The Spatial Politics of the Sculptural: Art, Capitalism and the Urban Space 1783487615, 9781783487615

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Situating the Sculptural
Installation and Spatial Politics
Deleuze, Space and the Sculptural
Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation
Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

The Spatial Politics of the Sculptural

The Spatial Politics of the Sculptural Art, Capitalism and the Urban Space

Euyoung Hong

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2016 by Euyoung Hong All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB: 978-1-7834-8759-2 PB: 978-1-7834-8760-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Name: Hong, Euyoung, 1975– author. Title: The spatial politics of the sculptural : art, capitalism and the urban space / Euyoung Hong. Description: New York : Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016020905 (print) | LCCN 2016021150 (ebook) | ISBN 9781783487592 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783487608 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781783487615 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Sculpture—Philosophy. | Social ecology. Classification: LCC NB1135 .H66 2016 (print) | LCC NB1135 (ebook) | DDC 730.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020905 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

vii

Acknowledgementsix Introductionxi 1 Situating the Sculptural 1. The Concept of the Sculptural 2. The Sculptural and the Urban

1 1 11

2 Installation and Spatial Politics 1. The Method of Installation 2. The Politics of Space

27 27 42

3 Deleuze, Space and the Sculptural 1. Dwelling and Space 2. The State and the War Machine

73 74 76

4 Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation 1. The Production of Urban Space and the Logic of Capital 2. Urban Development and Planning in Paris 3. Seoul: Urban Transformation Since the 1970s 4. Gentrification of New York City

85 85 95 111 125

5 Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural 139 1. Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle 139 2. Society and Space in Kyuchul Ahn’s Installations 145 3. The Modes of Production of Space in Richard Serra’s Terminal and Monika Sosnowska’s 1:1 152

v

vi Contents

Conclusion167 Bibliography173 Index181 About the Author

187

List of Figures and Tables

FIGURES Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4a Figure 5.4b

Gabriel Orozco, Yielding Stone, 1992 Michael Asher, Sculpture, 2007 Situating the Sculptural Removal Area in Seoul, 2012 Metropolitan Seoul, 2016 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Homeless Vehicle, 1988 Kyuchul Ahn, Bottomless Room, 2004 Monika Sosnowska, 1:1, 2007 The Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw, Poland Wave Houses, Gdansk, Poland

6 9 110 112 123 140 147 160 162 163

TABLES Table 1.1 Table 2.1

Distinction between a Sculptural Object and an Ordinary Object Changes in the Relationship between the Beholder, Space and Object in the Realm of Sculpture

vii

4 54

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who helped me with the preparation of the manuscript. The staff at Rowman & Littlefield International has always been supportive and encouraging of my project. I would also like to thank artists, galleries, foundations and museums who provided images and resources, specifically Kyuchul Ahn, Galerie Lelong, New York; LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster; Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warszawa; and Hauser & Wirth, London.

ix

Introduction

In the late 1980s, the South Korean government decided to initiate a massive housing construction plan, the “Two Million Home Construction Plan,” as a solution for improving problems of severe housing shortages and to stabilize housing prices.1 In this plan, five new towns around the capital city of Seoul, Bundang, Ilsan, Pyeongchon, Sanbon and Joongdong, were designated for redevelopment within a five-year period from 1988 to 1992.2 At present, the massive expanse of Seoul, which includes 305 areas, is still under the process of redevelopment, led by the government’s new town projects.3 Compared with other developed countries, the process of South Korean urbanization, particularly in such a restricted metropolitan area of Seoul, has been extremely violent, exclusive, mass-produced and standardized. In many cases, not only was it accompanied by destructive methods of forced displacement and relocation in order to achieve a targeted area in a short time, but it also had many negative side effects, such as geographical inequality and social hierarchization and fragmentation. Consider several recent cases of urban development in Seoul, for example, the Yongsan business district plan and the Eunpyeong new town project. Urbanization can be understood as a political process of spatial reconfiguration through the interrelationship between different forces; for example, the conflict between the productivity of active power, such as the government or a major construction company – which intends to transform a certain degenerated or underdeveloped area of space into a more profitable space or a new centre in terms of the logic of market competition – and the unproductivity of reactive power in and through the space – which tends to protect territories, secured from development, eviction and peripheralization.

xi

xii Introduction

Drawing on this particular aspect of Seoul urbanization, my practical and theoretical study of art has been mainly derived from considerations of how a space is produced, becomes transformed and disappears. In particular, I am interested in developing ways in which a sculptural practice acts as a new form of urbanism, which can be one way of participating, understanding, producing and changing the space. In the process, space is considered an essential means of (re)producing things, ideas, relations and orders, as well as of bridging differences. Since 2008, my interest in the space has gradually moved to a consideration of the political dynamism of the city. By looking at the city, I attempted to think of the current state of understanding of the meaning and function of space and expand it in relation to the formation of the system or the order of knowledge and things. In 2010 and 2011, I worked on several sculptures and installation projects. These were presented later in my solo exhibition Fragmented Space at the Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea in 2011. The projects in the exhibition were site-oriented, as they were all related to real sites in Seoul. For the project Re-moved (2010–2011) – which is a sculptural piece that is constructed by rearranging de-coloured found objects on a shelf-like wall structure according to a new principle – I visited several removal sites, not only to collect abandoned objects from the sites but also to observe continuous changes of the spaces. It was not difficult to find a redevelopment site in Seoul, because, in South Korea, the redevelopment of space has been considered a key measure for solving social, political and economic problems; for this reason, many small- and large-scale redevelopment projects have been planned and undertaken continuously and competitively until the present. Spaces have been changing extremely quickly. I visited the Kumwha apartments, located at the top of a hill in Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, several times between 2010 and 2012. The apartments are some of the oldest in Seoul; they were built in 1969 after the Korean War, originally for the purpose of public rented housing, particularly for lowincome families. However, the buildings were used in the political propaganda of the military government of President Park Junghui to strengthen his political regime after the Yushin reformation. In 2007, these apartments were included in the government’s redevelopment plan, owing to their poor safety conditions. They originally constituted ten buildings. However, most of these have been removed in the process of redevelopment and only two buildings currently remain. Accordingly, the people who were living in the apartments were asked to leave that place. However, there were a few families occupying the apartments when I visited, not only because those people could not afford to move into another place, but also because they were demonstrating against the government to address the injustice of redevelopment.

Introduction

xiii

In this period, I was also interested in another redevelopment site in Yongsan-gu, Seoul. This site was in the process of removal, when there was a huge physical conflict between protesters and the government. The Yongsan incident occurred in 2009. In February 2009, a number of people, who were asking for solutions to avoid eviction, lost their lives as a consequence of violent oppression from the special police. A 1,500-strong police force was dispatched to disperse about 50 protesters. The police actions taken towards these protesters were similar to those taken in times of war. Less than a day after those facing eviction started protesting, and without further conversations or any effort to discuss the issues, the government dispatched a special police force and staged an anti-terror operation. After the police entered the building where the protesters were, a fire broke out and the circumstances turned dangerous. However, without taking any safety measures, the police proceeded with the operation, which resulted in the death of five protesters and one police officer. My sculptural and installation works are constructed in relation to a real space, directly or indirectly, through the process of observing, entering, producing and transforming an actual site. By looking at changes and issues, particularly raised in the process of the development of urban space in Seoul, my research interests allow me to develop shifting ideas of the space or the urban, dealing with the question of the production of space and how it relates to the expanded concept of the sculptural from an interdisciplinary perspective. This relationship between the urban and the sculptural is inevitable, not only because a sculptural practice is no longer confined to the autonomy of art, which is separated from its environment, but also because it is considered an urban aesthetic or a form of urbanism, owing to its particular function in the urban by occupying a common shared space through competition with the forces of other urban practices and with capital. A sculptural work produces and is produced by its contradictory relationship with its environment or the urban by invading or, in other words, further constructing and destroying the existing conceptual and material territory of our reality through the politics of space. Taking a new step in thinking about the notion of the sculptural is significant, because a sculptural work not only generates the new through its body, which is absolutely beyond a physical object itself, but also transforms an object’s relation with its surrounding space, including the space itself. A sculptural work is, of course, not merely identified with the space or the urban, but produces a new political strategy of space by directly or indirectly affecting and being affected by its surroundings. Space is considered a key formative factor in producing a sculptural work. In my research, this is clarified by shifting the current idea of sculptural practice, specifically, through the transformation from the traditional concept of sculpture to the expanded notion of the sculptural. This transformation can be

xiv Introduction

established by the politics of space or, in other words, by moving through and beyond the object’s given territory and reconfiguring its spatial relations and movements through the dialectical logic of contradiction. Here, the space is definitely related to a particular aspect of the capitalist space of urbanism or urban restructuring, whereby various spatial, social and political conditions for the survival of individual lives can be formed and deformed, including particular patterns of spatial arrangement, organization, movement, relation and human behaviour. The concept of the sculptural that I claim in this study develops a new form of possibilities of urbanism, which not only provides an opportunity to consider the complexities of our reality from a new perspective, but also establishes the expanded role and function of the sculptural in the urban environment. To achieve this, my argument in this book is structured in five chapters. Chapter 1 aims to reconsider the perception of sculptural practice, particularly focusing on an investigation of the transformation from the traditional concept of sculpture to the sculptural, in terms of the notions of space, object and politics. It begins with an examination of the current understanding of sculptural practice by analysing Rosalind Krauss’s theoretical work, specifically her descriptions of modernist sculpture and new sculptures in the expanded field. Diverging from Krauss’s theory of the relationship between a sculptural practice and the expanded field, the book proposes a new methodology for reading, producing and expanding a sculptural practice, particularly by investigating the transformation from an ordinary object to a sculptural object. This sculptural transformation is approached spatially through the dialectical modes of spatialization: the inclusive mode and the exclusive mode. This chapter focuses on the contradictory relationship between the sculptural and the urban. Because of its three-dimensionality, a sculptural work is no longer considered an object-making. Space becomes an essential formative element in the production of a three-dimensional work. A three-dimensional work of art necessarily shares the space with other urban forms by inventing, producing and distributing its own spatial logic. By expanding the concept of space, chapter 2 considers methodological aspects of the production of a sculpture, both describing the state that is existent, but also the state that should exist. The combination of these things provides a new strategy for the political dimension of the sculptural. First, it develops the sculptural method of installation, which is to be distinguished from the traditional concept of installation art of the 1960s and 1970s. To do this, I focus on particular aspects of the traditional concept of installation art in terms of the concepts of totality, theatricality and experientiality, which have been dominant ideas in the contextualization of a sculptural practice until the present. I intend to reconsider the limits and problems of conventional uses of these concepts in the contemporary condition of sculptural production,

Introduction

xv

particularly by providing a critical view of Fried’s concept of theatricality and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. In contrast with the unitary and pre-given form of spatial systemization in installation art, the expanded concept of installation focuses on the political strategy of space, whereby a new form of relationship between the object, the space and the sculptural is proposed. This chapter also provides a connection between the object and politics in the production of a sculptural practice. It begins with the recognition of the shifting idea of the object, particularly its territoriality and territorialization. The concept of the object is explored by drawing on and analysing some art historical ideas, which include modernist objects and Duchamp’s ready-mades and minimalist objects, so as to articulate the concept of the object in terms of the expanded idea of the sculptural. In developing the concept of the object, the book focuses on the meaning and function of politics, by which I claim that politics is an operational concept that necessarily participates in the production of a sculptural practice, but also generates a particular relationship between the object and its environment. Drawing on Rancière’s theory of the relationship between art and politics, this object’s territorialization is articulated through the politics of equalization. Chapter 3 focuses on the shifting conditions of sculptural production, in which the territory of a sculptural work has been changed, particularly from the autonomy of the object to the inclusion of space, moving through and beyond the material surface of the object and the physical occupation of space. To understand this, the first section explores the concept of space, particularly its fundamental role in the production of a sculptural practice from a philosophical perspective. Distinct from Heidegger’s notion of dwelling, I explore the concept of space through the idea of dwelling, in which I emphasize its political dimension, particularly its symbiotic relationship with the concept of transit space. On the basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the state and the war machine, these contradictory, yet interrelated, ideas of space illuminate ways in which a sculptural practice produces itself, penetrating through existing relations and orders of a space. Chapter 4 provides an understanding of urban space, investigating particular ways in which a space is produced, urbanized and environmentalized in terms of the logic of capital. Drawing on Harvey’s theory of capital, it focuses on a spatial aspect in the process of urbanization by examining the interrelationship between capital flow and accumulation and the mechanism of production and destruction of space. In addition, it moves onto an investigation of a particular method of urbanization, which is centralization. The concept of centrality and centralization is considered an essential factor that urbanizes a space. By emphasizing Lefebvre’s dialectical logic, this chapter focuses on urban centrality, which is seen to be operated in the connection between space and dialectics. This finds a political aspect of centrality,

xvi Introduction

which not only participates in the process of producing and distributing new forms of power, but also expands the traditional concept of contradiction, for example, in Marx’s theory of capitalism. By examining particular cases of urban transformation, such as Paris, Seoul and New York, this chapter also develops the concept of urbanism; particularly its transformation from planned urbanism to produced urbanism. Through this particular transformation of urbanism, I investigate how urbanization in the cities has developed and how the relationship between territory and political system has changed, in terms of Harvey’s theory of neoliberalism. This will redefine the concept of the sculptural through its contradictory relationship with the environment or the city under capitalism. Chapter 5 aims to provide the concept of the sculptural through its dynamic relationship with the idea of the urban or the environment. By looking at some ideas and practices in the contemporary condition of art production, my research explores further the political relationship between sculptural practice and its environment, particularly focusing on the function of the space or the city, which is considered an essential factor that constitutes and produces a sculptural work. In this chapter, I propose a new connection between the sculptural and the urban by considering both ways in which urban space becomes operative in the production of a sculptural work and ways in which a sculptural practice acts in the formation of urban space or urbanism. By further expanding on the problem of the political relationship between the sculptural and the city, this chapter also examines the concept of the sculptural, which reconsiders issues and limitations, raised in the current understanding of sculptural practice. It focuses on the development of different modes of sculptural thinking and territorialization through particular examples of sculptural practice, including Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Vehicle, Kyuchul Ahn’s installation works, Richard Serra’s Terminal and Monika Sosnowska’s 1:1. This chapter proposes two different, yet interrelated modes of sculptural territorialization, through which a sculptural work can be actualized and expressed, to legitimize its particular relationship with its environment. One is the non-environmental mode of territorialization. By reinterpreting Serra’s installation, this mode considers the political potentiality of the concept of contradiction, whereby a sculptural practice invents and distributes a mode of juxtaposition, placing it in a space between difference places, rather than including it in either one place or another. The other is a trans-environmental mode of territorialization, which can be found through the work of Sosnowska. This mode provides a different pattern of spatial distribution, building one space within another space.

Introduction

xvii

NOTES 1. Richard Groves, Alan Murie and Christopher Watson, eds., Housing and the New Welfare State: Perspectives from East Asia and Europe (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 87–88. 2. H. S. Geyer, ed., International Handbook of Urban Systems: Studies of Urbanization and Migration in Advanced and Developing Countries (Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002), 514. 3. Eun-Joo Lee, “Park Reels Back ‘New Towns’ in Major Way,” Korea JoongAng Daily, 19 April 2012: http://mengnews.joinsmsn.com/view.aspx?gCat= 030&aId=2951759.

Chapter 1

Situating the Sculptural

In the current field of art, the concept of sculpture has conventionally been ascribed to art theory. Certainly, it is a difficult task to define “sculpture,” and we have already witnessed that sculpture has a broad definition at present – including various ideas and concepts of minimalism, conceptualism, performance and so on – and that this definition is in the process of change. This chapter aims to provide an expanded concept of the sculptural, to investigate the transformation from the traditional concept of sculpture to the sculptural, in particular, in relation to the notions of space, object and politics. To consider and develop the significance of the sculptural turn in contemporary art discourse, I attempt to expand and experiment further with the current understanding of sculpture by moving on to a new concept of the sculptural. This expanded notion of the sculptural concerns the ways in which the position of a particular work of art is newly taken and dislocated in terms of the complex dynamism of space. 1.  THE CONCEPT OF THE SCULPTURAL A sculptural work engenders and demonstrates certain forms of thinking about the world, for example, by providing a new concept of the production, transformation and expansion of space. Moreover, the problems involved in defining a sculptural object and a sculptural space are considered in contemporary art discourse. To achieve this, Rosalind Krauss’s famous theoretical work of sculpture is an essential point of departure in knowledge for the shift from sculpture to the sculptural.

1

2

Chapter 1

It would probably be more accurate to say of the work that one found in the early sixties that sculpture had entered a categorical no-man’s-land . . . sculpture had entered the full condition of its inverse logic and had become pure negativity: the combination of exclusions. Sculpture, it could be said, had ceased being a positivity. . . . Sculpture itself had become a kind of ontological absence, the combination of exclusions, the sum of neither/nor.1

In her text “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” originally published in the journal October in 1979, Krauss provides a new way of understanding and categorizing the notion of sculpture by relating different terms: (not-) landscape and (not-)architecture.2 However, I hold two opposite views of her argument. First, a positive aspect of her account of sculpture is that the expanded field – aligning not-landscape and not-architecture with sculpture – definitely draws our attention to the fact that there is a transformation; for example, the transformation of the autonomous characteristics of the modernist category of sculpture to a new set of possibilities of (postmodernist) sculpture, that is, site-construction (landscape and architecture), marked site (landscape and not-landscape) and axiomatic structures (architecture and not-architecture).3 Sculpture, which posits itself between not-landscape and not-architecture, is, therefore, no longer considered as having a quasi-status and taking on a mediative role between different concepts; rather, as Krauss emphasized, it plays a significant role as a “‘permission’ to think these other forms.”4 In this sense, sculpture becomes necessary for stimulating the transition from one to the other. Second, a negative aspect is Krauss’s use of the mathematical mapping strategy of the Klein group to extend the concept of sculpture.5 According to Krauss, pure negativity is considered a prerequisite for the construction of the expanded field of sculpture.6 This pure negativity is definitely related to the (modernist) sculpture’s loss of place or unmonumentalization, which is, to use Krauss’s words, something that can be established only in terms of what it is not.7 However, the problem appears at the point where Krauss puts the idea of pure negativity into a mathematical model, which is completely based on the logic of binary opposition, sharply dividing the neutral and the complex. In my view, this mathematical model can be successfully operated only if binary oppositions are completely accepted. In other words, if we negate, for example, her claims that the not-architecture is equivalent to landscape, and the not-landscape simply architecture, functioning as main structural axes in a diagram, then logical expansion through the diagram will be at issue. Theoretically, the crux of Krauss’s postmodernist expanded notion of sculpture is its incompatibility with such a structuralist logic of reductionist and static sets of opposition. Most importantly, the significant point that has been overlooked in her theory is that the expanded concept of sculpture necessarily considers a sociopolitical dimension of space.



Situating the Sculptural

3

Instead of applying a mathematical model, I attempt to develop the concept of sculpture from a different perspective, to clarify what the sculptural is and how it works. In terms of Krauss’s account of the negative condition of sculpture, the rejection of space, or sitelessness, is taken for granted as an essential condition for determining modernist sculpture, whereas site-specificity is frequently considered in both premodernist monumental sculpture and some postmodernist site-oriented sculptural practice. Rather than repeating this polarized opposition between sitelessness and site-specificity in the perception of sculptural works, I propose the phrase “sculptural space,” which is composed of a new interactive connection between sculpture and space or site, or both. The main points in which my context of sculptural space differs from Krauss’s view of the expanded field can be outlined as follows. The premise of sculptural space is based on the condition that a sculptural object produces not only itself, but also its surroundings, where it occupies conceptually and physically. In other words, the (modernist account of) static nature of the sculptural object is changed to the political strategy of spatial arrangement in sculptural practice, interacting with its surroundings. It is also completely distinct from the idea of neither/nor or either/or in the linear modernist categories. This means that a three-dimensional work cannot be understood without knowing its relationship with the space and environment, because the installation of an art object changes and reorganizes established power relations and social and spatial bases and orders by entering into the system of a given space. In other words, a three-dimensional work participates in creating a new conceptual and material relationship with the space. It is important to consider the complex spatial potentiality of a threedimensional work, which functions as an essential and critical factor for producing a new possibility of urbanism that definitely includes the categories of landscape and architecture. The sculptural in the phrase “sculptural space” is not equivalent to space. It can be understood as a force or a machine for producing differences or opportunities, which is mutually and critically related to the space or the built environment, and as its production, transformation and movement, rather than simply identified with a work of art itself or acting as a peripheral category in a certain kind of field. The concept of space here is not limited to blocks of physical buildings or nature, but conceived as a dynamic operation, which is able to actualize the production of difference in constant relation to our reality. This logic of the sculptural plays a significant role in inventing and experimenting with a means of constructing and deconstructing a given space via the coalescent method of conceptualization and materialization. A constructed space or a built environment also constantly affects the formation and change of the logic of the sculptural.

4

Chapter 1

The sculptural that I claim is differentiated from Krauss’s expanded field, whose idea is limited to extending sculptural works from the 1960s and 1970s, especially outside of gallery or museum systems, in terms of the logic of pure negativity. Also, it does not simply aim at dividing works of art, in Smithson’s context of the dialectical opposition between outdoor sculptural work (site) and indoor sculptural work (non-site). As Heidegger argues, “Strictly speaking, there is no outside or inside within space itself.”8 The sculptural does not simply reside in either the inside or the outside of a gallery. By transcending, or in other words, constructing or destroying further existent boundaries of space, the sculptural as an operative force between different elements and spaces is involved in the process of the production, transformation and movement of space. Furthermore, it resides in the creation and change of the line of division and movement. In this sense, an object – which is necessarily employed in a three-dimensional work – does not simply occupy either one place or another, for example, a gallery or a museum or the outside of a gallery or a museum. Instead, it is considered an essential factor in producing a new spatial configuration, in which an object appears as a new axis in a given space and unfolds and operates itself by distributing a new spatial law of determining and changing the conceptual and material territory of space. The important points that make a sculptural object distinct from an object in real life are provided, focusing on their fundamentally different characteristics. The role of the sculptural is to produce a new method of the transformation from an ordinary object to a sculptural object (table 1.1). To install an object, therefore, brings about a shift in established relations and systems of space, because, in the regime of the sculptural, an object and space are inseparable. The sculptural, as an operational dynamism, discovers and develops a dynamic interaction between object and space; specifically, the ways in which a work of art is situated in a given space to conjunctively or disjunctively become a part of that space, rather than as something that is possible to locate only within what is not. Hence, the sculptural recognizes the complex dynamism of space, acting through two separate yet interactive processes between an object and space: the inclusive and exclusive modes of the Table 1.1  Distinction between a Sculptural Object and an Ordinary Object Sculptural object Acts as an axis Operates in the logic of the sculptural Changes the perception of everyday life Active Specific Reproduces or even destroys the existing orders and systems

Ordinary object Acts as a tool Subordinate to the logic of everyday life Stabilizes existing orders and systems Passive General Contextualized in the existing system, such as history, economy, politics



Situating the Sculptural

5

sculptural.9 The inclusive mode of the sculptural is a localized event, whereby both objects and spaces enter into a certain kind of layered relationship as they move and combine from different fields; the exclusive mode of the sculptural is a delocalized event, in which established relations of an object and space can be spread out or re-juxtaposed through spaces. The sculptural arises in the interaction between these two processes. These two modes of the sculptural do not function as a structural framework for determining works of art within a list of categories (for example, the works of such artists as Robert Smithson, Robert Irwin, Alice Aycock, John Mason, Michael Heizer and so on, which are classified in between landscape and architecture, or the works of Richard Serra, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Dennis Oppenheim and Nancy Holt, which occupy a place between landscape and not-landscape). They are considered as essential dynamic systemizations, in which a sculptural work necessarily participates and produces itself by developing the sculptural modes according to its own creative methods. The inclusive mode, operated by the relational dynamism of sculptural work, does not aim at building either the specificity of a site, which produces a work of art that is only completed by its surroundings, or the sitelessness of pure negativity, which is necessary for constructing the absolute autonomy of a sculptural work; but it proposes a particular (relational) systemization or movement of space through the dynamic interaction between object and space.10 The inclusive here can be understood as an operational concept, whose function is to develop the internal logic (or consistency) of a sculptural work, which is definitely distinct from the traditional understanding of the essence of a thing or materiality; moreover, it does not indicate a sculptural work in the modernist account of self-sufficiency. It is an important process of sculptural production and expansion, whereby a work of art presents and actualizes itself through the invitation of surroundings or an exterior to its system of territorial force and movement. Rather than the logic of exclusion, this sculptural mode operates in the principle of inclusion, through which the exterior is used not as a physical or social material – which is passively selected and changed by the artist – but as a parameter that helps a sculptural work to have new limits of change, which therefore affect the way in which the work of art is produced. Transformed into a part of a work of art, the exterior becomes a deterritorializing force that revisits its original function and relation from a different point of view. For instance, it is obviously difficult to classify Gabriel Orozco’s Yielding Stone (1992) into one of the categories of Krauss’s expanded field: siteconstruction, marked sites, axiomatic structures or sculpture (figure 1.1). This work recognizes the inclusive logic of the sculptural. Rather than being seen as a work of art in itself, Plasticine® has traditionally been considered a raw material for modelling sculptural work because of its malleability. Unlike

6

Chapter 1

carving or cutting, modelling is an additive method for sculpting, in which material is built up to produce the finished work of art. The inclusive mode is definitely related to the appearance of a work of art through the accretive process of sculptural production and expansion, because it does not operate as a way of reducing one to the other, but as a way of layering one upon the other. In Orozco’s work, this layered relationship and movement between different places and things can be presented particularly through the operation of two main concepts: repetition and malleability. Once objects are placed in a selected space, a certain spatial principle is produced between separate objects, between the object and the space and between the object and the viewers. Repetition enables this spatial principle to function as a continuity and allows the constant distribution of certain types of spatial relation and movement through the space between different things and spaces, rather than positing itself as a meditative entity in a list of categorical distinctions, such as an object, monument, architecture or landscape. It is a precondition for creating, functioning, distributing and mobilizing a system. Rather than a system itself, repetition is an active force that produces a continuity of movement between different things and places, because it provides and resides in a shared space between different elements. This shared space does not exist to identify or control every different space under the same rule, but becomes a cause of intervening in and connecting with different territories by layering the existing onto the new through the (re)distribution and relocation of the sculptural flow between

Figure 1.1  Gabriel Orozco, Yielding Stone, 1992, Plasticine, 14½ inches × 15½ inches × 16 inches “File:GO Yielding stone.jpg”. Source: Gabriel Orozco, Wikimedia Commons, last modified, 10th September, 2013, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:GO_Yielding_stone.jpg.



Situating the Sculptural

7

the spaces. It gathers heterogeneous elements by producing and participating in a continuous line of events. This is called condensation. Malleability is another essential element of the formation of the inclusive mode of the sculptural. It does not literally indicate a soft and shapeable material condition. It is also opposed to Krauss’s account of the (modernist) sculpture’s double negation – not-landscape and not-architecture – in the context of its loss of place or sitelessness. This is because malleability can be understood as a reactive force that can exist and function only through its relationship with its surroundings, including not only landscape and architecture, but also the sociopolitical environment. Instead of providing a particular type of artisanal presence, for Orozco, spaces or our surroundings become a locus and a key method of the production of a work of art, not a backdrop for an artwork. The Plasticine ball not only absorbs dust in its movement through space, but also shapes itself against the pressure and contour of the surface of the streets on which it rolls. An object, therefore, cannot merely be identified with a concrete physical thing, which provides a fixed perceptual precondition of a sculptural work. Every object is spatial and political in its process of development. It is continuously produced and actualizes itself only through spatio-political engagement with its environment. It creates a new space in a place. In this respect, the sculptural cannot be possessed by or belong to the object’s essence, the thing itself, the specificity of a site or a viewer’s perception, but appears as a relational dynamism between different forces, movements and intensities of spaces.11 The title of the work (Yielding Stone) – specifically, the relationship between the notions of “yielding” and “stone” – allows us to rethink a sculptural object or materiality and its relation to the concept of production. This “Plasticine” work does not produce a final work of art, but a process. It produces itself by unproducing. It moves and appears by erasing its traces of movement. It erases its traces of movement by constantly layering the abandoned onto its Plasticine surface. It is a continuous process of layering. An object produces itself by responding to variations in the relationship between artist, (social) material and (social) display through the dynamics between intensities and forces. A sculptural object therefore becomes a place into which all these actions, reactions and forces are received and through which the conflictual and dialectical process of production and expansion are transmitted. The inclusive process can be operated and actualized at the moment when a territory becomes malleable and allows heterogeneous elements to enter into its own spatial system, that is to say, by pressing and stretching, construction and destruction through the process of repetition. Exclusion is also an important aspect of the expanded conception of the sculptural. In the current understanding of sculptural practice, objects installed in a gallery space or in the street, which probably came from a specific site in the world, do not necessarily refer only to that original place, because objects

8

Chapter 1

are constantly moving into other spaces. What I mean by “exclusion” is different from the modernist context of transportability of sculpture or complete deconstruction, but is related to the delocalization of space, through which a work of art enters into a political relationship with a pre-existing spatial arrangement and relation of its surroundings by blurring and escaping from its own territory (e.g. Gabriel Orozco’s Yogurt Caps (1994) and Parking Lot (1995)). In contrast with the additive process of the inclusive mode, delocalization, developed by the exclusive mode, is another method of producing and transforming a sculptural space, as it creates a subtractive movement in a given space; that is to say, it creates a process of weakening the intensity of a pre-existing set of relations, interacting with a new force of movement. Intensity, or what I call an “intensive movement,” operates through the process of localization, in which different things and spaces are invited to the territory of the sculptural and layered or conjoined to develop a new form of spatial accumulation (such as Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993)). This is the process of differentiation that helps not only to materialize a work of art by reaching its own conceptual and material limit, but also to provide a new line of division and difference through the reorganization of the hierarchy of spaces and things, according to its new spatial law. In the process of the delocalization of the exclusive mode, on the contrary, intensity becomes extensive or distributive through the space. This is the process of equalization, in which the difference of intensity is weakened by re-juxtaposing it with new things and spaces, without simply identifying one with the other. This process necessarily involves the sculptural work in the act of leaving its own territory and of invading the territory of others, rather than the act of inviting others to its own spatial law. This subtractive tendency of the sculptural mode is a complex process of movement that cannot merely be identified with either the negation of the self or the modernist reductionism of the 1960s and 1970s, which is frequently related to a Greenbergian account of a formalist language of abstraction of a work of art or its tendency towards self-referential purity in the outside world.12 The exclusive mode of the sculptural helps to develop a new sculptural strategy of weakening an object’s or a space’s established relations and systems through the equalization of differences. In the process, the territory of a work of art, in which a sculptural object is involved, appears as a potentially invisible form. The exclusive mode of the sculptural, in this sense, actualizes itself by escaping from a given material and conceptual territory and function, without completely destroying itself. In this mode, an object or a place can be a means of producing and expanding a mobile and shifting point by transcending its established systems and relations. For example, in Sculpture, presented in 1977, 1987, 1997 and 2007, Michael Asher installed a caravan, which appeared every ten years during the summer, moving to different locations



Situating the Sculptural

9

Figure 1.2  Michael Asher (1943–2012), Installation Münster (Caravan), Münster 1977. Parkposition 4. Woche, 25.7-.1.8.1977, Alter Steinweg, gegenüber vom Kiffe-Pavillon, vor der Parkuhr Nr.275 oder 274 anlässlich der Ausstellung ”Skulptur Ausstellung in Münster 1977. Michael Asher (1943–2012), Installation Münster (Caravan), Münster 1987. Parkposition 4. Woche, 29. Juni - 6. Juli 1987, Alter Steinweg, gegenüber vom Kiffe-Pavillon, vor der Parkuhr Nr. 2200 anlässlich der Ausstellung ”Skulptur Projekte in Münster 1987.” Source: © LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur(Westfälisches Landesmuseum)/Rudolf Wakonigg.

10

Chapter 1

in Münster, Germany (figure 1.2). My interest in Asher’s work is not in the distinction between the installation of artwork in or outside a gallery, in terms of Smithson’s dialectics of site and non-site, but focuses on the ways in which a sculptural work determines its territory and builds and functions its body within and through the interaction with its surrounding space. Moreover, this particular example of Asher’s work is significant in developing an understanding of the formation of the body of sculptural work and its extended meaning and functions in terms of the exclusive logic of the sculptural. In relation to the idea of exclusion, it is important to understand the way in which a sculptural object – here, the caravan – is installed, participating in its surroundings outside of the gallery or museum environment. The sculptural object is juxtaposed with the systems of everyday life. What makes Asher’s object a sculptural work is not simply the leaflets available at the museum – which clearly indicate that it is art within the context of exhibition – but his construction of a new realm of production, exhibition and distribution, which is based on the principle of mobility, indifference and spatiality. The work of art emerges when the object moves from its existing spatial relationship by disappearing and reappearing within a new spatial system. Asher’s main interest is, therefore, in the production of continuity between differences, such as the normal and unalterable, with change through the politics of displacement. This continuity is not provided by the physical change of the object, but by repeating the installation of the same object in specific sites. Repetition is the main method of production, which creates a particular temporal and spatial trajectory of the object in real space, moving between an artist’s storage site or rental shop and the sites of installation. Distinct from the traditional outdoor sculpture, particularly in its tendency towards monumentality, Asher’s sculptural work cannot be seen as a large object that possesses space and systemizes that space only through the perception of the spectator. Asher’s unaltered object is presented temporarily in the selected sites without any indication of the work except for a leaflet at the museum. The installation sites are also difficult for viewers to find, because most of them are far from both the city centre and the Skulptur Projekte headquarters. How many visitors have ever tried to find Asher’s work is questionable. The aspect of Asher’s work that interests me is not related to the matter of what is or is not identified as art by viewers. This work obviously de-emphasizes the bodily or theatrical experience of the sculptural work. By fading out the object, the artist fades in the urban space, the (changing) city. This does not construct an aesthetic constellation of abstract points and lines in real space, nor does it deliberately select a particular condition of space. The work resides exactly in the midpoint, when a sculptural object disappears in and is re-juxtaposed with urban space, and vice versa. In this midpoint, the unaltered caravan functions as creating a new experience of



Situating the Sculptural

11

difference and a new network of possibility between those different timeslots, transcending the bodily or theatrical experience of sculptural work. On the premise that the experience of the spectator does not determine Asher’s object as art, an important factor that defines the caravan as a sculptural object is the potentially invisible form of the object, which focuses on the space, not a physical or perceptible object itself. Consider Asher’s works installed in Münster. Once the selected caravan is set in the public space, the boundary of the work of art becomes blurred and vulnerable, because, by escaping from a certain form of environment – in this case, the gallery or museum system – it directly participates in a different spatial system, that is, the regime of everyday life. Entering into a new spatial relationship and environment can be the same as entering into the arena of war, in which nothing can safely and permanently protect and exist only for the body or territory of a work of art. An important point here is the manner of the disappearance or (re)appearance of the caravan within the system of everyday life. The disappearance and (re) appearance of the object are achieved by its deconstructive potency. Because of urban changes, the caravan could not always be installed in its same 1977 spots: “In 1977, the caravan occupied nineteen sites.”13 In 2007, only ten sites were available.14 Asher’s work focuses not only on the disappearance of the object, but also on the disappearance of place by urban development. 2.  THE SCULPTURAL AND THE URBAN In some particular examples of a three-dimensional work of art, I find the relationship between the sculptural and the urban important in thinking about the shifting contemporary condition of the production of a three-dimensional work of art. The basic premise of my argument in this study is structured around two main points. First, we share the same urban space. Second, a three-dimensional work of art is no longer considered a simple object-making. A brief description of each is important in understanding key ideas and concepts that form the basis of my research. I will then examine how these two points can be related particularly in terms of the concept of space. This study is also based on the assumption that a three-dimensional work of art, particularly when it encounters and intervenes in urban space, can contribute to both the material and the conceptual dimensions of spatial production and transformation. By developing the idea further from these two separate, yet interrelated, perspectives, I will clarify ways in which a three-dimensional work of art produces and is produced by urban space, practising a new form of urbanism; a three-dimensional work of art functions as a vehicle to provide and challenge new perspectives and potential roles in understanding the world, our environment and the space we live in.

12

Chapter 1

In the process of the production and installation of the object, an everyday object is transformed into a work of art, which not only poses questions on the conceptual and physical location or place of the object, but also produces a terrain on which different spatial strategies conflict. As we share the same urban space, which has never been neutral or empty, an artwork’s intervention into a given space necessarily encounters the different orders, systems and movements of the space in which a work of art is produced in the complex relationship between its own space and the space of reality or everyday life. In the concept of the sculptural – particularly in its transformation from the autonomy of the object to the inclusion of space – it is important to consider the idea of the urban in terms of the concept of space and its function in the process of production, movement and transformation. First, this study focuses on the concept of the urban, concerning ways in which a space becomes urbanized, particularly through the process of centralization; centralization functions as an essential method of making, unmaking and remaking the urban in terms of the dialectics of space. Second, it explores how this changing idea of urban space or urbanization certainly affects the formation of the sculptural in the fact that both the urban and the sculptural occupy a shared zone of space, but in a different way. As Michel Foucault argues, “Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile.”15 From the sociopolitical perspective, the urban, or built, environment has frequently been understood as a passive setting for capitalist development and expansion and the circulation and accumulation of capital. In considering the notion of urban space, specifically, the Marxist approach to urban theory has made important contributions to understanding the idea of the urban, particularly concerning historical patterns of urbanization, the distinction between use value and exchange value, the contradictory function of the local state, class struggles, the role of crises in capitalist development and the patterns of capital accumulation. Following this same Marxist approach, Lefebvre further examines capitalist development in relation to the notion of space by reworking Marx’s materialist determinism in connection with Hegel’s dialectical idealism. In The Survival of Capitalism, Lefebvre argues: The dialectic today is back on agenda. But it is no longer Marx’s dialectic, just as Marx’s was no longer Hegel’s. . . . The dialectic today no longer clings to historicity and historical time. . . . To recognize space, to recognize what “takes place” there and what it is used for, it to resume the dialectic; analysis will reveal the contradictions of space.16

For Lefebvre, space is formed and understood dialectically through a continuous movement between the concepts of conceived space, perceived space and lived space. Instead of reducing the dialectic to either the traditional idea



Situating the Sculptural

13

of synthesis – which is frequently understood in terms of the binary distinction, for example, between content and form, and between concreteness and abstraction – Lefebvre expands the concept of space in relation to a new form of dialectical logic, which is composed of flexible relationships between three modes of thinking. Accompanying social realms, Lefebvre claims that space is a complex entity formed by an external material environment (perceived space or spatial practice), the conception of space (conceived space or representation of space) and the lived social relationship with the environment (lived space or space of representation). Here, lived space, the third term, is not a higher concept resulting from two different terms, conceived space and perceived space, but acts productively yet critically as a social factor for producing a “differential space.”17 Lived space holds the possibility of potential or real transformation and movement, which can incorporate and transcend both perceived space and conceived space. Lefebvre argues that dialectical logic does not relate to a structuralist idea, which operates and classifies things and ideas within a framework of static systems. Hence, the role of the third term in the new dialectical logic of space is not only to deconstruct but also to resolve the static oppositions and contradictions of a given space and to actualize a fluid movement and connections in the social process. In considering the concept of space, Lefebvre emphasizes the dialectical understanding of urban centrality. Here, centrality does not refer merely to the particular population, geographical size or density of a place; rather, through the centralization, the different elements of capitalism can encounter and form a certain type of movement by rearranging and inscribing themselves in the space. For Lefebvre, the urban tends towards centrality through distinct modes of production and different productive relations and, at the same time, towards “polycentrality” through dispersion and segregation.18 Urban centrality is, thus, produced dialectically, because “the centre gathers things together only to the extent that it pushes them away and disperses them.”19 This dialectical understanding of centrality is differentiated from the traditional idea of centrality, for example, in Marx’s theory of centralization of capital and means of production in the development of capitalism. In the first volume of Das Kapital, Marx uses the term “concentration” in relation to the “size of an industry,” such as the extension and reproduction of the industrial and labour systems in the expansion of capitalism.20 Centralization is described as the moment at which a certain line of industry reaches its limit. Through this moment, centrality can be formed and realized by unifying all the individual capitals as a single capital.21 Lefebvre, however, sees centralization as a form of space, in and through which the complex process of production, change and movement occurs and comes into conflict, not as a mere economic method of expansion. The importance of Lefebvre’s theory of space lies in his exploration of urban centrality

14

Chapter 1

through the social realm and its relation to the role of space in the process of urbanization. For Lefebvre, urban centrality operates in the connection between space and the dialectic. He argues that urban space is seen as centrality, which is based on “simultaneous inclusion and exclusion precipitated by a specific spatial factor.”22 Unlike the Marxist perspective of centrality – which is formed and determined by the system of capitalism – for Lefebvre, space plays an important role in the formation of centrality. In other words, centrality is realized spatially. This is because space is not a homogeneous entity, but difference is immanent in the space. Difference can be understood as an essential element that makes a space operative and mobilized. It does not come from difference itself; rather, “differences endure or arise on the margins of the homogenized realm, either in the form of resistances or in the form of externalities (lateral, heterotopical, heterological).”23 What Lefebvre calls a “specific spatial factor” can, therefore, be found in the two inseparable distinctions of difference: an “induced (minimal) difference” and a “produced (maximal) difference.”24 An induced difference is conjunctive, participating in the formation of a set or system, controlled by a dominant force. This induced difference within an existing system works to connect distinct elements. It produces an abstract form of space by homogenizing and unifying all the differences as a single super-system. However, a produced difference operates disjunctively; it actualizes itself through the “shattering of a system.”25 It does not maintain and therefore solidify an existing system. A produced difference as a fragmented form creates an oppositional movement against the dominant and homogenizing force of abstract space. Through the transition from an induced difference to a produced difference, centrality moves continuously. Once an existing system reaches its limits, a produced difference generates opportunities, or gaps, through which it can build and move along a new line by opening up the existing system. These new lines can be systemized by the principle of induced difference. In The Production of Space, Lefebvre writes: Any centrality, once established, is destined to suffer dispersal, to dissolve or to explode from the effects of saturation, attrition, outside aggressions and so on. This means that the “real” can never become completely fixed, that it is constantly in a state of mobilization. It also means that a general figure (that of the center and of “decentering”) is in play which leaves room for both repetition and difference, for both time and juxtaposition.26

From this dialectical point of view, centralization is conceived as an essential method of making, unmaking and remaking the urban. Centrality is political and definitely goes beyond the dichotomic boundary of centre and periphery or of urban and rural. Specifically, in the circumstance of globalization, centrality has a flexible yet complex spatial dynamism, moving



Situating the Sculptural

15

through and beyond certain geographic or historical limitations. As Lefebvre claims, “The violence that is inherent in space enters into conflict with knowledge. . . . Power – which is to say violence – divides, then keeps what it has divided in the state of separation.”27 Power is immanent in centrality, because a space is abstracted as a certain form through the process of centralization. Abstraction is conceived of as a means for exercising power. Centrality is, however, differentiated from the traditional notion of power, which is frequently described as something that can be possessed, flows from top to bottom and is repressive in itself.28 Centrality, rather, acts as an essential element that necessarily participates in the process of producing and distributing new forms of power. Centralization cannot be reduced to the instrumentalization of power, but it characterizes a space, reconfiguring pre-existing spatial relations and movement through conflict and reconciliation. The politics of centrality, therefore, do not act to possess a static form and relation, but operate in the process of change and movement. It is not a single particular agent of power, but the “uneven and combined relationship” of power that produces the mobility of centrality.29 Lefebvre perceives this contradictory tendency of power relation in the space of capitalism, for instance, in the production of a homogenized space that is bound up with the differentiation of fragmented spaces. In this respect, the dynamics of centrality can be understood as a spatial expansion that is formed and moved by the interaction between accumulative power (centring) and dispersive power (decentring). This complex nature of centrality can be seen as the condition for a transition from one to another, for example, an old mode of production and social formation to a new progressive mode. Specifically, on the one hand, in the process of urbanization, different things and ideas are constantly gathered and accumulated in and through the space, producing a (new) centre. On the other hand, the centre transforms and disperses what it brings together to different spaces. Accumulative power and dispersive power coexist and interact with each other in the formation and movement of urban centrality: “The ‘dialectic of centrality’ consists not only of the contradictory interdependence between the objects gathered but of the opposition between center and periphery, gathering and dispersion, inclusion (to center) and exclusion (to periphery).”30 Drawing on Lefebvre’s theory of dialectical centrality, the notion of space, particularly the urban that I would like to explore in this study, cannot, therefore, be identified merely with either architecture or the construction and deconstruction of buildings, roads, bridges and towns or with an absolute framework for social actions, within which things are safely settled and classified. In the process of global urbanization, a particular tendency of spatial movement has been recognized. The urban or urban centrality is, in particular, conceived as a force of stratification that actualizes or inscribes a certain conceptual or material movement in space. This line of movement

16

Chapter 1

can be formed by the politics of contradiction, which are mainly considered an essential operative concept, whereby spatial networks are juxtaposed and superimposed in connection with different territorial, industrial and urban elements. The term “contradiction” has often appeared in Marx’s theory of capitalism, in which he develops Hegel’s abstract and idealist logic of dialectics in connection with a materialist perspective by linking it to social practices. Marx understands “internal contradiction” as the immanent tendency of the development of capitalism, which can be summarized as: (1) market instability, (2) the falling rate of profit, (3) the production of surplus value and labour exploitation and (4) the unequal distribution of wealth.31 These four aspects of internal contradiction accelerate the centralization of capital through the process of capital accumulation, “because beyond certain limits a large capital with a small rate of profit accumulates faster than a small capital with a large rate of profit.”32 Expanding on Marx’s idea of contradiction, Lefebvre distinguishes his notion of contradiction from the idealist contradiction between two concepts that are integrated, and transforms it to a higher concept. By moving through the space between oppositions, for example, the permeabilization of crossing and transgression and the militarization of immobility and control, contradiction, rather, participates in the process of creation or (re)production. This process of creation necessarily accompanies the reconfiguration of urban space, specifically the transformation of a given space and the rearrangement of spatial relations (of production). Lefebvre claims: The notion of the Third Term reacts decisively on the notion of contradiction, which ceases to be an absurdity, a hesitation and an oscillation or confusion of thought. The “necessary” conflict between finite determinations is “brought to light”; the relation between the contradictory terms is lucidly established. . . . The Becoming passes through the conflicting terms, confronts each of them, on its own level and in its own degree, with its “other,” which is in conflict with it, and finally transcends their opposition by creating something new.33

Contradiction is, therefore, a creative activity, which constantly causes movement or becoming in the established systems and relations by producing new contradictions or differences. It is difference that produces contradicting moves and emphases. The urban “centralizes creation . . . where different things occur one after another and do not exist separately but according to their difference.”34 Through the politics of contradiction, the urban produces a form of convergence as a line of networks, which connects two different yet inseparable movements of spatialization: abstract movement (verticalization) and contradictory movement (horizontalization). These two movements participate in the process of the production of urban space by actualizing a



Situating the Sculptural

17

certain type of conceptual or material line in that space. Therefore, conflicts and contradiction between the movement of a new line of spatial organization and a given space are inevitable in the process of urbanization. In the production of urban space, these two types of spatial movement function differently. If abstraction – for example, the abstract space of capitalism, such as signs and images – is understood as the act of erasing or absorbing differences, contradiction can be considered as activating or actualizing the logic of difference. Abstract movement homogenizes different elements under the totality of a certain spatial logic. Contradiction, by contrast, provides a chance of escape from established spatial relations, whereby differential movement is generated. This differential movement of contradiction does not aim to separate or distinguish things to construct a fixed structure; but it generates flexible networks by making new relations between different things and ideas. Contradiction constantly creates actual or potential differences through destabilizing abstract space; this can be understood as the moment at which accumulative power is switched to dispersive power. From a spatial perspective, both abstract space and contradictory space – or global space and fragmented space – coexist and move in a line of consistency, transforming one to the other. In other words, the role of contradiction in urban space is to make the organization of a given space dispersed, interpenetrative (porous), flexible and operative. In the logic of contradiction, a space makes a transition from folding to unfolding. For Lefebvre, contradiction is produced in abstract space, but it cannot occupy abstract space completely, because contradiction does not aim to possess or exchange one space with another. Rather, it finds and develops gaps and cracks in abstract space, so that differential space can emerge through the space of breaks. Lefebvre understands contradictions as immanent in power and abstract space as a method or representation of that power. Considering the process of the urbanization of space, Lefebvre claims, “There is nothing more contradictory than ‘urbanness.’”35 In relation to capitalism, this becomes clear when we look at the particular tendency of the development of urban space, specifically, that which the contradictory movement of different flows – such as the permeabilization of local absolute and the militarization of relative global – encounters in and through urban space and creates a new spatial logic. As an example, in his text “Notes on the New Town,” written in Introduction to Modernity in 1995, Lefebvre considers the development of the new industrialized town of Mourenx in the late 1950s in France in contrast with the nearby old town of Navarrenx. Lefebvre describes the newly planned space as a “technological objects” and “machines for living in.”36 It will be functional, and every object in it will have a specific function: its own. Every object indicates what this function is, signifying it, proclaiming it to the

18

Chapter 1

neighbourhood. It repeats itself endlessly. . . . What is surprising here is that everything is disjointed, and yet all these separated people are governed by a strict hierarchy. As soon as they get together the hierarchy comes to the fore, fiercely, furiously, through pride. In each building and tower block, everyone is like everyone else.37

At the beginning of “Notes on the New Town,” the new town is seen as a “mediator between nature and human beings, both as individuals and as groups.”38 As opposed to the old town – which acts as an unmediator in society and nature – the new town produces an abstract space, which has a tendency towards the totalization of space, erasing all differences. By contrast, Lefebvre sees the old town as an organic entity, which spontaneously forms itself within its own territory.39 The spontaneity and slowness of the old town, like a living creature, creates a nostalgic cosiness and softness. However, in the end, it becomes “the pure essence of boredom” with the loss of its vitality.40 For Lefebvre, this notion of boredom is understood from two perspectives. First, there is the boredom of post-war state-led urbanism between the late 1950s and the late 1960s in France. Lefebvre argues that the new town reduces spaces to their functions. This functionalism of the new town creates and is exchanged into a mere signifying system. The new town becomes a controlled space that is organized and subdivided within a new spatial law and order, resulting in a certain form of colonization. The new town, defined by its specific function, constructs itself along a line of escape, which follows open and decoded flows (of the capital). This line of escape does not fill and solidify a space, but empties out a given space, covering it with a “thin, opaque human material.”41 Through the emptied space, according to Lefebvre, “Retail is becoming more important than production, exchange more important than activity, intermediaries more important than makers, means more important than ends.”42 Then, there is the boredom of the old space. Lefebvre reads time and the past through the old town. The old town produces and changes itself in the logic of interiority or internal necessity, rather than through an overall planned systemization from the outside. In the old town, “Every house has its own particular face. It is amazing the diversity which can be obtained spontaneously from the same unchanging . . . regional elements.”43 The space of the old town is considered an end, rather than a means. As an end, the old town takes on a certain form of singularity, which is composed of indivisible flows. Lefebvre ends “Notes on the New Town” with the conclusion that the abstract space of the new town penetrates not only the old town, but also everyday life. Lefebvre pays attention to the ways in which a space is created and expands its territory through the invasion and disappearance of one space by another, such as the rural by the urban, rather than separating them. Space is not a solidified entity, but is always in the



Situating the Sculptural

19

process of formation, absorbing, transforming and expanding differences and contradictions. By looking at the development and change of particular places in France in the mid-1900s, Lefebvre reveals that the terrain of the urban is conceived as the centralization of space, which necessarily penetrates the process of the decentralization of space, dissociating and dislocating its own conditions, when encountering a certain limit of growth and permanent competition between rival producers, including the innovation of new technologies. The conflictual movements of urban force, therefore, coexist and participate in the formation of a certain spatial pattern, because space is considered relationally and relatively, rather than as an absolute framework for social action and events.44 From a spatial perspective, this changing idea of the urban and its particular spatial system in terms of the politics of centrality certainly contributes to an understanding of the expanded concept of the sculptural and its complex relationship with the environment or urban space in the artistic process of production. The sculptural and the urban are separate, yet interrelated, because both the urban and the sculptural occupy a shared zone of space, but in a different way. In this respect, space is considered an important decisive factor to form, change and understand this complex relationship between the sculptural and the urban. A three-dimensional work of art is no longer considered a simple objectmaking. Because of its three-dimensionality, to think about the sculptural is, therefore, to invoke a set of spatial relations, structures and systems, moving from private space to public space, from virtual space to actual space, from conceptual space to material space or from economic space to cultural space. Three-dimensionality is considered a spatial being in the real world. In other words, a three-dimensional work occupies a space in competition with other urban forms. There are differences in the way of practising urbanism by different urban forms. While three-dimensionality of architecture is established by the enclosure of space and its given social functionality, a sculptural work is relatively unrestricted from creating and experimenting with a new form of three-dimensional space in and through the built environment. A sculptural practice becomes a spatial location of occurrence, where a work of art produces and participates in new forms of engagement with the world and expands our current knowledge, ideas and relations by creating differences as a part of everyday life. In this respect, the concept of the urban becomes an essential element for constructing an expended idea of the sculptural. The interrelationship between the sculptural and the urban is possible through the idea of space, not because the urban is identified with space, but because space as a key factor is immanent in both the sculptural and the urban. An important point here is to clarify how both the sculptural and the urban can occupy a shared zone of space, but in a different way. First, they have

20

Chapter 1

different spatial characteristics and systems. In The Urban Revolution, published in 2003, Henri Lefebvre defines the urban: “The urban (an abbreviated form of urban society) can therefore be defined not as an accomplished reality, situated behind the actual in time, but, on the contrary, as a horizon, as an illuminating virtuality.”45 The urban is made unfolded, functioning, visible and materialized in and over the space. The urban can be understood as a conceptual and material force, which can locate power in space, by creating and mapping points of production, distribution, circulation, centralization and conflict in and through the systemization of space. In the systemization of space, the urban actualizes the organization and exercise of power, in which things and ideas can be shaped or abstractified as sites of encounter, division, production, conflict and control. In this respect, urban space, which is a phase, constituted by the notion of the urban and space, (re)constructs the order of a city, society and regulation through the concretization of the urban environment. Urban spaces have always been in change, because space is a contested zone, which is constantly influenced by various cultural, social, economic and political powers, associations and values. These powers, associations and values have continued to change. The (re)making or (re)production of urban spaces, therefore, operates in terms of their changing physical forms, social and economic functions and representation and meanings. An important factor that makes urban space operate in a certain way is the notion of capital. In Marx’s theory, capital is considered a means of production. It is “not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion.”46 For the survival of urban space, capital is necessarily in change and motion, so that its value does not disappear and its system does not stop. The urban is definitely inseparable from the logic of capital, as the centralization of capital makes the urban; and the urban creates an ability or a chance to concentrate and flow capital in new forms and systems through the space. The production and expansion of social and spatial infrastructures, such as financial, educational, administrative systems, built environments, transportation and urban systems, is essential for the survival of capitalism, as it not only supports the circulation of capital, which produces more profits, but also reproduces our everyday life. In the logic of capital, the urban constantly invents and applies a new way of systemizing, controlling and producing a space, not only to acquire a more profitable position in the market, but also to establish a spatial politics, determining who controls the space, how to use it and how to be produced. According to Lefebvre, space is global, and maintained as such – the space of sovereignty, where constraints are implemented, and hence a fetishized space, reductive of differences; a space, secondly, that is fragmented, separating, disjunctive, a space that locates



Situating the Sculptural

21

specificities, places or localities, both in order to control them and in order to make them negotiable; and a space, finally, that is hierarchical, ranging from the lowliest places to the noblest, from the tabooed to the sovereign.47

Lefebvre argues that the key factors of capitalist production, such as land, labour and capital, become concrete in this particular aspect of space.48 This is certainly related to what he calls “abstract space,” that is, “a tool of domination,” in which a space is constructed and destroyed in the paradoxical relationship between homogeneity and fragmentation.49 As Lefebvre argues, “There is a violence intrinsic to abstraction, and to abstraction’s practical (social) use”50; abstract space makes a space homogeneous by exercising forces. In terms of the concept of abstract space, the urban participates in the production of capitalist space. It is a dominant force, which is oppressive, hierarchical and classificatory. It controls a space in the logic of homogeneity, so that differences can be erased. A space, produced by this dominant force, is hierarchically ordered in the capitalist system of production, such as global financial networks, business centres, information networks and transport networks, restructuring the space from centres to peripheries and from high to low. In the system, the homogeneous whole is fragmented into exchangeable parts and values as a commodity. These fragmented parts are distributed and circulated throughout the world. In the process, the urban exercises a centralized space of power. Because three-dimensionality can be constructed by occupying a real space, the sculptural necessarily operates, produces and territorializes its space in competition with the abstract space of capitalism. In the shifting condition of contemporary art, the modes of the production of a work of art have been expanded and varied. Its aim cannot, therefore, be simplified as decorating, beautifying or improving urban space in the system of capitalism, functioning as a public furniture or a commercial product. The sculptural as a critical force rather provides sites of contest, violence and resistance, which intervene in and challenge the established order of abstract space, that is, the dominant organization and system of space and power of capitalism. A work of art, which operates in the logic of the sculptural, is least controlled by the centralized power of capitalism. The art market, which circulates a work of art as a commercial product to earn more profit in the system of capitalism, has been growing significantly. Ironically, it is clear that the majority of those artists who are particularly focused on installation, performance and site-specific practices produce their works outside the gallery, museum or art market system. This is because a work of art cannot be identified simply with a commercial product or an everyday object, which is planned, manufactured and circulated in the system of mass production, targeting at a certain group of consumers. This means that contradiction and conflict can emerge, when

22

Chapter 1

different elements and systems encounter in the shared zone of urban space. Like other urban practices, a three-dimensional art practice produces and distributes a new set of relations in its own spatial principle by sharing, occupying and transforming the space of everyday life, or simply urban space. While the urban exercises its power through the space by means of exclusion, such as the centre and the periphery, or upper and lower positions, the sculptural reterritorializes a given space in and through the invention and distribution of its own creative methods and principles. This becomes clear when we consider an example of Gordon MattaClark’s art practices. In 1975, Matta-Clark created one of his most important works, Day’s End. He used and transformed an abandoned Hudson pier warehouse in Manhattan, New York, into a work of art. Before this work, he used Hudson piers for the production of Untitled Performance in 1971 and Pier In/Out in 1973. In Day’s End (1975), the artist sliced parts of the floor and ceiling of the pier, and cut a large eye-shaped hole through the walls. The changing sunlight passes through the holes and lightens and animates the dark interior of the pier. This abandoned warehouse is currently used as a parking space for the Department of Sanitation in Manhattan and was one of the remnants of the Hudson piers, which were originally constructed and opened in 1910 to serve as passenger ship and cargo terminals. In the process of deindustrialization during the post-war period, these piers faced decline, as new transportation systems were provided, such as intercontinental flights, while increasing numbers of containers required a larger improved dock system. This monumental industrial building presents not only a certain aspect of the industrial age of New York City, but also of the history of the United States. The exhibition was immediately ended by the police and the New York City filed a lawsuit against the artist, which was eventually dismissed. During the 1970s, Matta-Clark created a series of cuts. His works focus on the physical and social transformation of abandoned industrial buildings and areas in the cities. Most of his works disappeared with the demolition of the buildings in the process of regeneration. As he states, “A simple cut or series of cuts acts as a powerful drawing device able to redefine spatial situations and structural components. . . . Each building generates its own situation”51; the relationship between art and architecture is important in Matta-Clark’s art practices. His work presents new modes of exploring the space, architecture and the city. His intervention in the spaces of architectural buildings and urban spaces through cuts in floors, walls and ceilings presents new modes of sculptural production. His work explores the idea of contradiction, particularly concerning ways in which new things or ideas can be constructed or produced through destruction in and through the tension between binary oppositions. This idea can be related to an understanding of contradictory aspects in the spaces of capitalism, focusing on concepts, such



Situating the Sculptural

23

as (re)development, abandonment, stability, protection, ephemerality, violence, production, power, structure or property. In the process of destruction, his practice challenges and experiments with the stability of existing orders, systems, structures and ideas by changing our consciousness and the way we perceive our world. In his works, violence is immanent in the process of creating cuts in the walls of abandoned buildings in the cities, which certainly weakens the stability of architectural supporting structures and systems. However, these cuts are not limited simply to the aesthetic creation of marks, lines and shapes in the space of reality, or to the artistic expression of hostility against architecture and the city. The work, rather, allows us to rethink the city, environment and society we currently live in, which can be viewed and observed through the holes and voids of the cuts in the abandoned spaces that the artist created. Architectural space is a dominant governing spatial system, which not only controls people’s ideas and behaviours, but also functionalizes, rationalizes and hierarchizes a space in its particular spatial logic, constructing a (social) zone. A work of art attracts viewers’ eyes to focus on spaces outside the architectural systems or any fixed points, which certainly change our viewpoints to discover what we have neglected in everyday life. The sculptural constantly invents new modes of the production of space in the conceptual and material transformation of the built environment, that is, the space of the urban.

NOTES 1. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (London: MIT Press, 1986), 282. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 284. 5. Ibid., 283. 6. Ibid., 282. 7. Ibid., 280. 8. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Indiana: Gateway, 1967), 21. 9. The sculptural modes of condensation and displacement are differentiated from the psychological conception of Jacque Lacan, in which he develops an understanding of the formation of human unconsciousness, originally drawn from Roman Jakobson’s linguistic theory of metaphor (condensation) and metonymy (displacement). 10. The relational systemization or movement does not merely indicate the artwork’s actual participation in a social environment and context and its creation of intersubjective encounters, reducing a work of art to either a human relation or a model of sociability.

24

Chapter 1

11. This concept of malleability can be found in other examples of sculptural practice, such as Sooja Kim’s Bottari: The Island (2011), and Bottari Truck – Migrateurs, “Je Reviendrai” (2007 and 2008), “Recent Projects,” Sooja Kim, accessed 10 May, 2013: http://www.kimsooja.com/recent_projects.html. 12. Greenberg argues, “Feats of ‘engineering’ that aim to provide the greatest possible amount of visibility with the least possible expenditure of tactile surface belong categorically to the free and total medium of sculpture. . . . A work of sculpture, unlike a building, does not have to carry more than its own weight, nor does it have to be on something else, like a picture; it exists for and by itself literally as well as conceptually” (my emphasis). Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press Books, 1961), 145. 13. Stephan Pascher, “Phantom Limb: Michael Asher’s Sculpture Project,” Afterall 17 (Spring 2008), http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.17/phantom.limb.michael. ashers.sculpture.project. 14. Ibid. 15. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 70. 16. Henri Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production, trans. Frank Bryant (London: Allison & Busby, 1976), 14–17; my emphasis. 17. Lefebvre describes “differential space”: “A space yet to come but which, in contrast to the homogenizing power of the abstract space of capitalism, will be a more mixed, interpenetrative space where differences are respected rather than buried under sameness.” Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 114. 18. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 119–20. 19. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 386. 20. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 1:552. 21. Ibid., 688. 22. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 386; my emphasis. 23. Ibid., 373. 24. Ibid., 372. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 399. 27. Ibid., 358. 28. In the work of Michel Foucault, power is redefined as that which is productive, expressed from the bottom up through social relations. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1, The History of Sexuality (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 94. 29. Leon Trotsky used the concept of “uneven and combined development” in analysing the international tendency of capitalist progressive development and change and its relation to non-capitalist regions – to use Benno Teschke’s terms, socially combined yet geographically uneven geopolitical accumulation: “Capitalism



Situating the Sculptural

25

gains mastery only gradually over the inherited unevenness, breaking and altering it, employing therein its own means and methods. In contrast to the economic systems which preceded it, capitalism inherently and constantly aims at economic expansion, at the penetration of new territories, the surmounting of economic differences, the conversion of self-sufficient provincial and national economies into a system of financial interrelationships. Thereby it brings about their rapprochement and equalizes the economic and cultural levels of the most progressive and the most backward countries.” Leon Trotsky, The Third International after Lenin (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 19–22. 30. Łukasz Stanek, “Space as Concrete Abstraction,” in Kanishka Goonewardena et al., eds., Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre (New York: Routledge, 2008), 74. 31. Karl Marx, Capital, ed. David MacLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1:447–57. 32. Ibid., 1:456; my emphasis. 33. Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, trans. John Sturrock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009), 20. 34. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 117; my emphasis. 35. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 386. 36. Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes, September 1959–May 1961, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1995), 118. 37. Ibid., 119–23. 38. Ibid., 118. 39. Ibid., 116. 40. Ibid., 118. 41. Ibid., 124. 42. Ibid., 121. 43. Ibid., 116–17. 44. David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006), 77. 45. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 16. 46. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso, 2010), 12; my emphasis. 47. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 282; my emphasis. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 370. 50. Ibid., 289; my emphasis. 51. Peter Muir, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect: Sculpture, Space, and the Cultural Value of Urban Imagery (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 40.

Chapter 2

Installation and Spatial Politics

In the shifting condition of sculptural production, the territory of a sculptural work has been changed, particularly from the autonomy of the object to the inclusion of space, moving through and beyond the material surface of the object and the physical occupation of space. This sculptural territory can be achieved by systemizing a space, particularly through the interrelationship between the object, the space and the sculptural. In the process, a new form of sculptural work can be produced and determined. To understand this, this chapter aims to explore the current understanding of the sculptural systemization of space or the politics of installation, particularly by focusing on the transformation from the traditional idea of installation art to the expanded concept of installation, and by exploring the ways in which a new relationship can be formed between the object, space and spectator, and actualized through and beyond established ideas, orders and relations. This chapter develops methodological aspects of the production of the sculpture, both describing the state that is existent, but also the state that should exist. The combination of these things provides a new strategy for the political dimension of the sculptural, re-illuminating the sculptural method of installation. Some of my ideas are influenced by other works on the history of art, such as those of Krauss and Fried. 1.  THE METHOD OF INSTALLATION Installation here is not a reduction to a type of art or a category, such as installation art, “into which the viewer physically enters, and which is often described as ‘theatrical,’ ‘immersive’ or ‘experiential.’”1 The reason for this 27

28

Chapter 2

is that these three aspects of the traditional concept of installation – theatricality, immersiveness (or totality) and experientiality – tend to simplify the meaning and function of installation on the basis of an idealistic perspective. From this idealistic perspective, an installation is defined as the configuration of objects in a space where the totality of the objects and the space systemizes the artwork. An object responds affirmatively to the pre-given set of the whole. In many cases, the traditional concept of installation does transform the spatial qualities of its site and the relation between spaces; but in the condition of totalization, it makes both merge into one another, simply blurring their distinctions. This kind of spatial development – especially merging one with another – has a certain limitation to perceiving and creating complex spatial relationship with existing spaces. In the traditional concept of installation art, as distinct from the sitelessness of modern sculpture, the tendency of totalization can be found in the relationship between object, space and spectator. This totalization does not refer to the containment of a work of art in the centre of a homogeneous system, whether it be a site or a sociopolitical context. Rather, this sculptural continuity can be achieved through the logic of time, which has less emphasis in the traditional concept of modern sculpture. The successive present of time is provided not by the object itself, but by the spectator’s changing viewpoints, or the viewing subject, moving between the object and space. An important point here is to understand the method of connecting the spectator’s changing viewpoints. While the spectator can have a unitary view of an entire two-dimensional work – a two-dimensional work does not itself include real space – an installation practice cannot be perceived at a glance, simply because it includes the space as a body of work; and its size is, therefore, physically larger than that of the spectator. This means that the perception of the installation work is much more complex than that of the two-dimensional work. In installation art, the spectator’s physical movement is considered an essential formative factor that can create the perception and even completion of a work of art. The movement of the spectator can be achieved by two different yet interwoven elements: space and time. Space acts as a multiplicity of juxtapositions, in which a space can be divided into multiple views as a quantitative value. It is time that penetrates these discontinuous spaces or the quantitative value of space. Through the logic of time, movement can be actualized, particularly on the basis of the continuity between the future and the past. In this process, a space can be reorganized as a form of the indivisible according to some qualitative value; and the spectator can, therefore, produce and experience a new single situation. In installation art, the function of time and space is certainly related to Bergson’s philosophy. In contrast with Kant’s notion of time and space, Bergson, in Time and Free Will, establishes the concept of duration to



Installation and Spatial Politics

29

provide a new understanding of the relationship between time and space.2 He distinguishes this concept of duration from traditional notions of time; to use Bergson’s terms, he distinguishes “homogeneous time” from “pure duration” in terms of the concept of multiplicity. Homogeneous time, that is to say, space, is defined as “a medium in which we make distinctions and count.”3 By contrast, Bergson asserts: Pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number: it would be pure heterogeneity.4

For Bergson, time is, therefore, seen as creative, qualitative and heterogeneous. Space is quantitative, homogeneous and fixed. On the basis of this dualistic idea of time and space, that is, the distinction between the internal experience of time or duration and its outer space, he develops the theory of movement, by which duration acts as “the illusory form of a homogeneous medium,”5 which is not only situated in and contemporaneously intersects time and space, but is also able to link between and permeate to different territories. Bergson argues that the successive positions of movement are conceived as space, and the progressive process from one position to another is conceived as duration. Movement is composed of and achieved through two distinguished but intertwining elements: “the successive positions” (the space traversed) and “the synthesis of these positions” (the act by which we traverse it).6 Duration is therefore considered as a (philosophical) means of connection and movement between different elements, in this case, space and time, which can be understood in terms of the logic of synthesis that is the centrality of Bergson’s theory of movement, in that it enables space to transcend its static, quantitative and immobile nature, by creating a qualitative form, a line of movement. Unlike Judd’s specific object – which is seen as neither painting nor sculpture – installation art does not place itself between existing categories of art simply as a form of hybrid, because it creates a completely different form of art. In terms of Bergson’s idea of duration, installation art challenges the limits of traditional sculptural work by establishing artistic and philosophical connections between notions of time and space through the system of installation. Installation art, therefore, has a particular tendency of spatial systemization, which is holistic and self-definitional, because the spectator sees an installation work not as a sequential unity of separate parts, but as a whole, a totality. This becomes obvious when we consider minimalist sculptures, such as Robert Morris’s Portland Mirrors (1977), Installation (Green Gallery, New York, 1964) and Carl Andre’s 5 × 20 Altstadt Rectangle (1967).

30

Chapter 2

In the work of Morris, totalization can be found in the work’s particular form of spatial systematization. Minimalist objects have a tendency of deduction, which takes the relationships out of the objects, rather than accumulating them in the space within the objects themselves, such as modernist monumental sculpture. Morris describes this minimalized process as making an object less self-important. Through the process of extension beyond the objects, power transits from the space of the objects to the space between the objects. The space and its function are, therefore, considered significant in the construction of the artwork. In the case of minimalist works, the large scale of the work involves a continuity of the space between the viewer’s space and the space within the artwork. The space of minimalist work functions mechanically or in the logic of dispersion. Minimalist sculpture creates pre-existing or a priori systems, in that they existed before the perception of the spectator. These systems operate simultaneously and automatically in terms of the principle of a single uniform symmetricalization, which tends to eliminate the relationship of domination. This single symmetricalization assembles repetitions of symmetrical objects. Through the continuous rhythm of symmetrical repetition, time presents itself successively by formulating an intersection between the objects. This symmetrical system of space attempts to control chaos and rationalize differences, creating a shelter to contain fragmented individuals in a certain unifying system. My work is atheistic, materialistic and communistic. It is atheistic because it is without transcendent form, without spiritual or intellectual quality. Materialistic because it is made out of its own materials without pretension to other materials. And communistic because the form is equally accessible to all men. By impelling relational activities, the mediated interior of exhibitions is a reminder of the dissolving the boundary of the object and its surroundings.7

In the case of Andre’s sculptural work, totalization can be found particularly in his emphasis of the planning of the work, not in the art-making process. For Andre, the idea directly controls the result. In other words, as soon as the system is in action, the outcome has been pre-determined. To control the result, Andre’s work employs a particular spatial strategy, which actively influences an existing space. In 5 × 20 Altstadt Rectangle, for example, Andre arranged industrial materials to cut into space, slicing across the gallery floor, allowing the spectator to enter the work. The installation of the objects becomes the division of space. Rather than the transformation of the space into a set of discrete spaces, the division of space is considered the reconfiguration of existing space within a large pre-given system, becoming environmental. While sculpture is considered a three-dimensional object that the spectator can walk around and look at, installation art is seen spatially; the spectator



Installation and Spatial Politics

31

participates in the space and becomes a part of the work. In conjunction with totalization – in which space is systematized as a whole situation through an immersive experience – installation art also forms itself in the process of theatricalization. The term “theatricality” was introduced in Michael Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood,” originally published in Artforum 5 in 1967. In this essay, Fried attempts to criticize minimalist sculpture (he calls it “literalist art,” as Greenberg did), such as the works of Judd, Morris and Caro, in terms of his notion of theatricality. He argues, “Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. . . . Whereas in previous art ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],’ the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation – one that . . . includes the beholder.”8 According to Fried’s concept of theatricality, the logic of being distanced is particularly emphasized, in that both a sculptural work and the beholder exist in the space as, in Fried’s words, a form of stage presence, which means that the presentness of a work of art has to occur instantaneously only with a certain distance between object, space and beholder.9 He approaches the meaning of being distanced by prioritizing the presence of the space over that of the object. He specifies this particular method of encounter with a (minimalist) work of art as “the experience of coming upon literalist objects unexpectedly.”10 In this respect, a sculptural work of art as the theatre (or the theatre of production) means that the generation and existence of a work of art necessarily occurs in the exterior of the work of art. More precisely, for Fried, the presence of a work of art completely depends on a situation or staged circumstance, which makes a beholder stand as a subject, as he describes, in an indefinite and unexpected relation to the (staged or pre-programmed) space.11 In the same vein, Fried also emphasizes time, that is, temporality, as the necessity for the existence of a sculptural work, in terms of which a beholder has to simultaneously approach and move away from a work of art. In other words, a viewer is allowed to access a work of art from a certain distance through its bodily or phenomenological experience. This happens precisely through the ways in which the viewer moves about to produce an infinite number of viewpoints, so as to look at a three-dimensional work from all around it.12 Unlike the modernist sculptural object, installation art becomes inclusive and expansive by occupying a space in the same way that people and things occupy it. The object is placed on the floor, like ordinary objects, without relying on a pedestal, which has functioned as a symbol of demarcation between art and non-art. The object is, therefore, considered not as an autonomous entity, separate from its surrounding; rather, it becomes less important and less focused, as it includes its surroundings and its relation to its surroundings within its body or territory of work. Important aspects here are how the object

32

Chapter 2

relates to its surroundings, and how the relationship between the object, space and spectator can be formed and systematized in a certain way. Installation art re-establishes art in terms of its participatory, experiential nature, whereby spectators can interact actively with the work of art. In other words, the perceptual law of the spectator mainly functions in, or even controls, the relationship between the object and the space. As the territory of the object is expanded, the spectator does not come to look only at an object itself, but experiences the space that is formed by the object. In terms of the logic of theatricality, the spectator acts as a main actor as well as a co-producer of the work. The spectator enters, is surrounded by and even becomes a part of the surroundings. This totality or totalization can be achieved by the immersive engagement of the object, space and spectator within a single, uniform law of installation. The merging of the spectator with the space or the surroundings, therefore, has been considered an essential condition of creating and determining an installation art. Distinct from the traditional idea of installation or installation art as previously described, I find and investigate the state that should exist for constructing the expanded concept of the sculptural. To do this, I focus on the significance of the meaning and function of installation in the production of the sculptural, particularly considering (1) the politics of space and (2) the relationship between the concept of installation and the environment. First, the traditional concept of an installation’s simple identification with a situation, which is mostly controlled by the logic of totality, theatricality and experientiality, tends to reduce not only the meaning and function of installation, but also its relationship with the environment. The expanded concept of installation, by contrast, acts as an essential sculptural methodology, which produces a complex relationship with the environment through its production and distribution of the mode of spatialization or the politics of space. The politics of space is related neither to the totalization of space nor to Smithson’s account of dualistic distinction between site (interior installation) and non-site (exterior installation). Rather, the space between objects is emphasized as a set of relations or a particular pattern of movement, which cannot be controlled by a pre-existing unitary spatial rule. Space is not seen as a passive material outcome, nor as a theoretical framework; rather, it is an essential element that necessarily participates in the process of the production of new orders, relations and movement, by creating a critical relationship with existing spaces as well as spectators. In the process, space transforms itself from the invisible to the visible and from the territorial to the de-territorial, and vice versa, rather than remaining a static framework. In this respect, I focus particularly on what transforms a given space and an ordinary thing; what is the significance of this transformation in the expanded concept of the sculptural. To achieve this, it is, therefore, important to consider the political



Installation and Spatial Politics

33

dimension of installation and its relation to the spatial transformation in the realm of the sculptural. In the transformation from the traditional notion of sculpture to the sculptural, the concept of space has been changed. From a spatial perspective, the traditional concept of sculpture is not only autonomous, absolutely sovereign, in terms of its tendency towards a self-contained entity, which ascribes the need of its existence to the provision of a physical and psychological experience through the object, which is detached from beholder and space. It is also homogeneous in that it tends to hierarchize its territory as a static organization through the logic of gravity. By contrast, the sculptural is produced and operates according to the politics of space or the method of installation, which functions to produce a porous and therefore penetrable space, filled with movements and change, rather than to colonize or possess a certain solidified space. In this respect, the concept of space is an essential element in understanding the sculptural, in that space acts constructively or destructively, participating in the process of producing new orders, relations and movements in relation to existing spatial systems. Installation here is distinct from the closed spatial system of modernist sculpture. I take the view of sculpture from the notion of the closed system, in terms of the logic of the monument, as Krauss describes in Sculpture in the Expanded Field: entering the space of what could be called its negative condition – a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place. Which is to say one enters modernism, since it is the modernist period of sculptural production that operates in relation to this loss of site, producing the monument as abstraction, the monument as pure marker or base, functionally placeless and largely self-referential.13

In the expanded idea of the sculptural, installation is considered a much more complex spatial system, in which the boundary of its territory is not only flexible, but also permeable to its surroundings. The closed system (sculpture) is not separated from the sculptural; rather, it can be expanded and transformed into the sculptural through the logic of installation. Hence, I consider installation a key spatial concept, not because it is simply understood as putting a sculptural object in a space, but because space becomes a strategy or medium of action, capable of producing a particular type of conceptual and material rhythm in and through a given space. Through the politics of installation and its symbiotic relationship with the notion of space or territory, this section particularly focuses on how an actual site is transformed to a sculptural space and how a sculptural space transits from the abstract to the real, from the virtual to the actual and from the condensed to the displaced, and also provides a new approach to reading and understanding a sculptural practice, amalgamating the process of conceptualization with materialization.

34

Chapter 2

As opposed to the closed system of modernist sculpture – particularly of its loss of space – installation here focuses on the significance of meaning and on the function of space in creating a sculptural work, as well as on the invention of the sculptural mode of production. Installation, as a main sculptural method, functions according to the politics of space. Specifically, installation is the reconfiguration of space, whereby the space between objects can have an expressive value equivalent to that of the objects themselves. This is a way in which a sculptural practice achieves and actualizes its political potentiality through the space. Installation can, therefore, be understood as a spatial dynamism, constantly generating differences and, at the same time, strategically utilizing those differences for creating a new relation by situating and operating itself between limits and potentials, between actual and virtual and between material and immaterial. In the process, installation functions as, in Deleuze’s words, “different flows and waves in a pond of matter,” which structure and activate the flexible mechanism of space that can be, for example, constructive on the one hand and destructive on the other hand. Heterogeneities – which Deleuze defines as “matters of expression” that “become bound up with one another through the consolidation of their coexistence and succession” – can be connected through the concept of installation.14 This is because a new mode of installation constantly gives rise to action upon existing relations, through which its uneven, unstable, violent power structure keeps providing a challenging and transgressive moment of change to the existing space. It is a transgressive moment that brings about potential variations and mobility in a sculptural space, which operate within and beyond the system of real space or everyday life. I recognize important functions of installation, which put a space in the process of movement, de-familiarization and differentiation, and therefore bring a new expressive value into the space. Through the politics of installation, an ordinary object can be transformed into a sculptural object; a given space or the built environment can be changed into a sculptural space, transgressing its existing spatial limits and orders. From a philosophical perspective, this transformation and transgression of object and space can be articulated through Deleuze’s concept of force: “What defines a body is this relation between dominant and dominated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a body – whether it is chemical, biological, social or political. Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into a relationship.”15 In Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche, force has been defined as a capacity to produce a change (or a becoming). Deleuze distinguishes types of force as quantitative or qualitative. First, “Quantity itself is . . . inseparable from difference in quantity. Difference in quantity is the essence of force and of the relation of force to force.”16 Second, “Quality is nothing but difference in quantity and



Installation and Spatial Politics

35

corresponds to it each time forces enter into relation.”17 According to Deleuze, “The superior or dominant forces are known as active and the inferior or dominated forces are known as reactive. Active and reactive are precisely the original qualities which express the relation of force with force.”18 Referring to Deleuze’s idea of force, particularly the relationship between the active and reactive characteristics of force, installation is thought of as a political operation that can enter into a relation as a form of active force and, at the same time, negate and escape the relation as reactive force.19 Through the interaction between two different forces, active and reactive, installation can be operated to produce a spatial rhythm, which is understood as, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s words, the action of territory, that is, the expression of territorialization.20 Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s idea, installation can be achieved and operate through the politics of space as follows. 1. Providing and exerting formative power through the interaction of force with force, thus producing different intensities, such as a specific type of movement, the “temporality of a particular material vector,”21 and a spatial presence in a particular form. 2. Putting a space constantly in a state of violence. Installation, hence, generates the conflictual territory of production, transformation and movement, whereby space becomes both homogeneous and discontinuous. In this complex spatial system, heterogeneous elements are continuously transformed from one to the other, by which one element is stretched over the other through the transgressive movement between the dominant and the dominated. 3. Producing capitalist space, by which I mean that installation is able to construct, expand and transform its territory, by constantly connecting and interacting with non-capitalist space. The Deleuze–Guattari context of the notion of capital can be one way to think about the sculptural relationship between space and politics. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari consider several important aspects of capitalism. What is really new are always the new forms of turnover. The present-day accelerated forms of the circulation of capital are making the distinctions between constant and variable capital, and even fixed and circulating capital, increasingly relative; the essential thing is instead the distinction between striated capital and smooth capital, and the way in which the former gives rise to the latter through complexes that cut across territories and States, and even the different types of States.22

36

Chapter 2

In terms of their concept of smooth space, I focus on the way in which Deleuze and Guattari consider capital not only as the production of difference, which is formed through, in their own words, “an infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction,”23 but also as a process, rather than a thing, which can be seen as becoming itself or the “absolute of passage.”24 The production of capitalist space is, therefore, to expand its territory through the constant reorganization of space, “by which ‘one’ leaves the territory.”25 This makes space continuously leave room for opening to another possibility of the emergence of difference and relation. Space is, thus, never permanently or fully occupied by anything. It becomes transient through the fact that the principle of escaping prevents the space from being completely filled and thus solidified by a single dominant power. This definition of capitalist space evidently corresponds to the formation of an expanded conception of sculptural installation. In Gordon Matta-Clark’s Office Baroque (1977), for example, the politics of space forms a critical relationship with the work’s environment, transforming a site into a sculpturalized space through the process of what I call de-architecturalization. In Matta-Clark’s work, architectural space is seen as neither permanent nor stable, but as an accessible rhizomatic space of change, movement, transgression, in that the artist’s action transforms the space as a flexible entity, enabling it to move within and beyond its constructed form and structure. Transformed into a destructive form of sculptural space, this sculpturalized architectural space or de-architecturalized space is read as a radical attempt to move beyond the idealism of architectural space, by which I understand the architectural realm of idealism as relevant to the product of the modernist context of universal and totalized abstraction, purity and functionalism. Contrary to the urban idealism, in Matta-Clark’s work, the concept of dearchitecturalization has an interactive relationship with capitalism. To understand this, I focus particularly on Bob Jessop’s three aspects of the nature of the capitalist relation and its dynamic: • The incompleteness of capital as a purely economic (or market-mediated) relation such that its continued reproduction depends, in an unstable and contradictory way, on changing extra-economic conditions; • The various structural contradictions and strategic dilemmas inherent in the capital relation and their changing structural articulation and forms of appearance in different accumulation regimes, modes of regulation, and conjunctures; and • Conflicts over the regularization and/or governance of these contradictions and dilemmas as they are expressed both in the circuit of capital and the wider social formation.26



Installation and Spatial Politics

37

In relation to these particular aspects of capitalism, de-architecturalization does not aim simply to have an opposite action or movement against capitalist urbanism. It, rather, acts as a dynamics of spatial reproduction, which recognizes and redevelops a vulnerable space in a particular way, which is produced and occupied by the contradiction and conflict of capitalism or the logic of capital. This sculptural mode of spatial production coexists and experiments with limits and boundaries of the space, transforming them into a productive force. The violence of the artist’s action is, therefore, not considered a deconstruction in a literal sense, but a continuous reconstruction or reproduction of a degenerated space by exploiting the ephemerality of architecture or a given space and by restructuring the space according to the new logic of space. By looking at the relationship between de-architecturalization and capitalism, the mode of spatialization in Matta-Clark’s work can be thought of as taking the limit of space to the constant state of re-territorialization, whereby a new spatial force or rhythm is formed, passing through the radical but productive process of violence and transformation. “Our ordinary environment is always ambiguous; functionality is forever collapsing into subjectivity, and possession is continually getting entangled with utility, as part of the ever-disappointed effort to achieve a total integration.”27 In this respect, Office Baroque does not construct stable conceptual and physical boundaries, since it constantly destroys and therefore transforms existing boundaries of space by situating itself in the shifting moments of tension between the visible and the invisible and between the inside and the outside. In Matta-Clark’s work, the territory of the inside and the outside of the building is invaded and therefore transformed into a completely different space, more translucent, violent, fearful, bold and brutal, constantly escaping from its existing form and system. In sculptural installation, this differential space is formed at the very moment of transformation from one space to another; in this case, from architectural space to sculptural space. Like a domestic house or private living space, an office is also a part of urban space, but it is not used for (personal) dwelling. It has a complex spatial system, in that people from difference places gather around a particular space – convergence – produce various kinds of (social, economic, political) events or actions (for the production of profit) – expansion – and then disperse – dispersion or distribution. This is a transitional and flexible zone in itself, in which the potential can be actualized through a transformation, such as from a mode of convergence to one of expansion. Spatial politics thus focuses on the significance of constructing an expanded concept of space, which does not indicate a simple physical transformation of space, but is rather related to the development of a new mode of the production of space. Through the politics of space, a space becomes equalized in actualizing its

38

Chapter 2

expressive value, not only in structuring a work of art, but also in constantly challenging and reconfiguring existing systems and orders of the built environment. Matta-Clark’s Office Baroque does not produce itself according to the logic of site specificity, which is based on the principle of parallel relationships between actual site and sculptural space, because a site-specific work of art provides a harmonized space, in which each of the spaces – actual site and sculptural space – coexists by preserving its own singularity; in other words, by not allowing the invasion of each territory. By contrast, installation emphasizes the production of a political zone, transforming the regime of space from one to another, for example, from the regime of everyday life to that of the sculptural. In the concept of installation, space itself becomes a material that exists as a porous and fluid form, able to move through and beyond its singularity. The production of this completely transformed space can be understood in relation to the concept of functional site, one that James Meyer defines: The functional site may or may not incorporate a physical place. It certainly does not privilege this place. Instead, it is a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and textual filiations and the bodies that move between them (the artist’s above all) . . . the functional work refuses the intransigence of literal site specificity. It is a temporary thing, a movement, a chain of meanings and imbricated histories; a place marked and swiftly abandoned. The mobile site thus courts its deconstruction; it is willfully temporary; its nature is not to endure but to come down.28

Through the method of installation, a sculptural practice can discover and distribute a new possible succession of movement, a new sequence of events, and orders in a space by generating not only various conceptually and materially experimental forms of space, but also a political zone. It can be said that a sculptural practice can be produced and challenged by its relationship with its site, whereby not only is the territory of a work determined but its boundary is also continuously changed and expanded by receiving its actualization on the basis of the rhythm of its movement. In terms of the politics of space, installation is, therefore, seen as opposed to the idea of totality or totalization, as it does not aim to achieve the immersive engagement of the object, space and spectator within a single pre-given law of installation. The concept of installation can be articulated through its relationship with the space, which is the environment. In the history of art, the term “installation” has been identified simply with an environment or with the process of becoming environmental.29 However, in the theory of sculpture, the concept of environment has not been widely discussed, but used by artists in several



Installation and Spatial Politics

39

different contexts through their practices and writings. “Environment” may refer to an artist’s intervention in a specific site, whereby a work is integrated with its surroundings and explores its relationship to the site-specificity, as in the land works of Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. “Environment” may also be used simply to denote public art that engages the urban landscape as another environment and also as a ground for engaging ideas and concepts about the environment to the public, for example, Doris Salcedo’s installation at the eighth Istanbul Biennial in 2003. Or environment may indicate a visual system of space, which is created by a particular set of movements through the mapping of the perception of the spectators, rather than presenting itself monumentally. This includes the minimalist works of Richard Serra and Robert Morris. Finally, environment may be related to a totalizing work of art, which includes different concepts and elements in a single work of art, such as the spectator, situation, happening and performance, moving beyond the separation between art and life, as, for example, the work of Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg. Unlike sculpture, however, which has a relieving space around it, these Environments tended to fill, and often actually did fill, their entire containing areas, nearly obliterating the ruled definition of the rooms. . . . The important fact was that almost everything was built into the space it was shown in, not transported from studio to showcase.30

Allan Kaprow coined the term “environment” to describe the three-dimensional space of a room-filling work.31 This term has been used with the terms “environmental installation” and “environmental art,” which moves “outward, toward imbrications of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ spaces’”32 by synthesizing not only different categories of art, but also different elements into a whole system. Kaprow calls this a “total art”33 or a total installation. Environment challenges the traditional definition of an art object, continuing into and merging with its surroundings. The work of art is now freed from its pedestal; it can now be turned into a situation, an action, an environment or an event, instead of an object. The work produces a space, not an object, in which spectators can and should actively participate. In Kaprow’s essay, “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art,”, originally published in 1958, an environment as a total work of art is described from three points of view.34 First, the environment is produced by the installation of objects, for example, by placing industrial materials or found objects in a selected site. A continuum is formed in the environment, which is a single, uniform situation that produces an immersive environment and systemizes the installation of objects. This situation can be understood as a particular manner in which something is positioned, or as a particular spatial condition in which something is situated. Kaprow focuses

40

Chapter 2

on the creation of situations through his installation work. The situation does not control the space by relying on a pre-established set of object–subject relations and orders, such as a fixed form of stage setting and actors, who can play only their own assigned roles within the provided scripts and plots. Instead, it emphasizes the fluid relationship between the work, the spectator and the space, and challenges that relationship through the unexpected event. The situation has a plan, but its process is not preceded by a fixed order, owing to its simultaneous organization of events. The space of the exhibiting room becomes a structuring factor, which functions as a process, rather than a planned result. Second, the participatory factor of Kaprow’s Environments focuses on the inclusion of the spectator. The environment can be produced and completed by the spectator’s interaction with the work: “The artist, the spectator, and the outer world are much too interchangeably involved.”35 This inclusion of the spectator plays an important role in Kaprow’s work, especially his concept of happening, which is described as “a new art form, which cannot be confused with paintings, poetry, architecture, music, dance, or play.”36 In the Legacy of Jackson Pollock in 1958, Kaprow first used the term “happening,” which is defined as the artwork’s active involvement in ritual, magic and life as a form of vanguard theatre.37 For Kaprow, happening is inseparable from environment, because the environment can exist only when the spectator, as a co-producer of the work, participates in and interacts with the space through the form of happening. Both environment and happening insist on the spectator as an organic part of the entire work. Third, an important aspect of Kaprow’s claim of environmental installation is its temporary nature or immediacy. Kaprow negates the market-oriented space of conventional art systems, particularly de-emphasizing collection and commercial circulation and distribution. He employs found objects and installs them temporarily and directly in the space of everyday life. The space of everyday life is certainly different from the institutional space of commercial galleries and museums, because the space is open-ended and therefore unprotected and unexpected. Kaprow’s installation enters and experiments with this space in two stages of spatialization: through the installation of objects in the site and through the act of the spectators. These two stages of spatialization clearly bring about the rearrangement or reproduction of the objects, the space or even the entire work, which is originally provided by the artist. The formation of a work of art can, therefore, be achieved by the ephemeral arrangements of the objects in the constant process of change and development: The exhibition . . . is unique in that it is the first group show by artists working within the totality of physical space creating environments which demand full



Installation and Spatial Politics

41

and active participation from the viewer. . . . Each artist [Brecht, Dine, Gaudnek, Kaprow, Oldenburg, Whitman], though highly individual, aims at complete utilization of all facets of environmental space; achieving, thereby, a new and profound form of art expression. Walls, ceilings and floors lose their confining identity, merging into this recreated space. The viewer finds himself within the artistic statement, forcing him to forgo his passive objectivity.38

In Yard, an installation work, presented for the exhibition Environments, Situations, Spaces at Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, in 1961, Kaprow filled a space with used tyres in the backyard of the gallery. The work functioned as art only when the spectators entered the space and interacted with the tyres by, for example, stepping on, touching or moving them. The spectators’ acts physically changed the work. Against Greenberg’s formal aesthetics – based on the priority of formal elements, such as line, shape and colour – the principle of environment or environmental installation in Kaprow’s installation emphasizes an aesthetic of the experience of life, in which a transient and momentary experience of the spectator is seen to be as significant as the artist’s art-planning. Drawing on John Dewey’s pragmatic perspective, particularly his theory of art as experience, published in 1934 – which provides an extended understanding of the relationship of the work of art and actual life experience, in opposition to the aesthetic theories of Immanuel Kant – Kaprow’s installation attempts to construct a new form of aesthetic experience, transforming it into an environmental experience that physically encompasses the spectators as an organic part of the work and their interaction with the space.39 By merging the spectators themselves in the system of installation, Kaprow focuses on the relationship between art and life. In the current shifting condition of sculptural production, installation, however, cannot be identified simply with the idealist account of environment or being environmental. Rather, I explore the complex relationship between a sculptural practice and environment, particularly focusing on the concept of non-environmentalization or being non-environmental. What I mean by nonenvironmentalization or being non-environmental should not be confused with anti-environment, which refers to a conservative view of environmentalism that is frequently understood as a radical sociopolitical movement against environmentalism; rather, it is the opposite of the idealistic understanding of the concept of environment, held by such artists as Kaprow, in which it is seen as a static, immersive wholeness. Like traditional installation works, the extended concept of installation is also inseparable from the notion of environment (as well as the spectator), as they are, of course, considered to be a set of operational concepts in the production of a sculptural work. However, the difference between traditional installation art and the installation of art lies in the ability to develop the sculptural mode of production by making a

42

Chapter 2

critical and even conflictual relationship with its surroundings. The methods of the spacing of objects can be achieved, therefore, not by the immersive logic of totalization but by the logic of non-environment. In the logic of nonenvironment, installation can be put into an action, particularly through the devolution of power from the existing authority of space to the new regime of legislation, for example, from the space of the museum to the space of the sculptural, or from a social space to a sculptural space, rather than by simply merging both. 2.  THE POLITICS OF SPACE Situating a three-dimensional work in a space cannot be simplified as the absorption of the work into the space, functioning as a unitary part in the given system. Because of its three-dimensionality, a sculptural work occupies, changes and produces a space, in competition with other urban forms. In this respect, the discovery and development of a way of situating a work of art in the space, that is, installation, is emphasized, which I would like to find through the expanded concept of the sculptural. Once a work of art enters a space, it necessarily encounters or even conflicts with different spatial relations, orders, systems and structures of the space, because every space has its own territory. Installation is the process of making a new relationship with different spaces and territories. The political aspect of space plays an important role in the process, in that the production of space in the logic of the sculptural is based on a complex mechanism of spatial movement and transformation, rather than a simple unitary system in the given space. It is, therefore, significant to consider a sculptural practice in the context of the production of a mode of spatialization and its relation to real space or the environment, rather than limiting it to the Friedian context of the totalization of a pre-given stage setting (to use Fried’s term “stage presentness”) of a work of art. A new mode of installation not only provides a particular form of spatial relations and orders, but also brings about various types of material and conceptual emergence. “Installation” is the art form that takes note of the perimeters of that space and reconfigures it. The ideological impossibility of the neutrality of any site contributes to the expansion and application of installation, where sculptural forms occupy and reconfigure not just institutional space but the space of objecthood as well.40

Installation makes art’s own spatial system or principle legitimate, interacting with and challenging the existing system of a site, whereby an object



Installation and Spatial Politics

43

has a right to occupy a particular space; transformation of the space can be made possible. As Erika Suderburg argues, “In installation, the object has been rearranged or gathered, synthesized, expanded, and dematerialized.”41 Installation can, therefore, be achieved spatially through the transformation and movement of space. This sculptural mode of spatial transformation is certainly related to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of territory, particularly its complex political system of space. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari wrote: A territory has two notable effects: a reorganization of functions and regrouping of forces. On the one hand, when functional activities are territorialized they necessarily change pace (the creation of new functions such as building a dwelling, or the transformation of old functions, as when aggressiveness changes nature and becomes intraspecific). . . . In short, a territorialization of functions is the condition for their emergence as “occupations” or “trades.”. . . That other effect, which relates not to occupations but to rites and religions, consists in this: the territory groups all the forces of the different milieus together in a single sheaf constituted by the forces of the earth.42

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of territory, in installation, both the reorganization of functions and the regrouping of forces can be considered as two important ways of reconfiguring a space, or formulating non-environment. This reconfiguration of space is achieved through the operation of two intertwining contradictory spatial systems. One of these is the condensation of space, which tends to contain and repress space interior to the system. The other is the displacement of space, which is capable of producing flexible boundaries by “lines of escape.”43 Condensed space is operated by the vector of verticality, whereby space is able to construct a relatively stable form. It is the process of territorialization, which is performed by the principle of assemblage and, at the same time, constantly interacts with a resistance to gravity. Displaced space is conceived as a destructive and dispersive tendency of spatial movement. By activating the force of horizontality, this space is able to reorganize the form that is produced through the operation of condensed space. This is called the process of deterritorialization, which expands and spreads a constructed form (or space) according to the principle of rearrangement or relocation. Deterritorialization has its fundamental significance in that it is thought of as a critical force, capable of producing and distributing a new strategy for constructing its politicality. It not only builds a certain conceptual and material form, but also destroys and expands the built form, by reconfiguring its spatial system of territory. In terms of Deleuze’s concept of reactive force, deterritorialization can also be seen as an inverted image of territorialization, which “limits active force, imposes limitations and partial restrictions on it and is already controlled by the spirit of the negative.”44 In considering

44

Chapter 2

the system of installation, particularly related to the process of non-environmentalization, territorialization arises from and returns to deterritorialization, since these two conflicting spaces, condensed and displaced spaces, coexist not only to constantly produce a new and different type of space through their interactive and symbiotic relationship, but also to make a space territorialized at one point and deterritorialized at another without any discontinuity.45 This complex relationship between space and politics is recognized in, for instance, Robert Morris’s felt work, as Krauss explains: Morris spread immense stretches of felt onto the floor of his studio and cut a linear pattern into their surfaces. The pattern meant that as long as the material remained on the floor the work would appear to organize itself in relation to image, to Gestalt, to form. But Morris would then raise these felts onto the wall, suspending them from hooks, so that gravity would pull apart their surfaces into gaps of disturbing irregularity. Now scattered, the pattern would disappear; instead, the gaps would become the index of the horizontal vector understood as a force constantly active within the vertical field – a force that had been put in play in a move to disable the very formation of form.46

To take this account to the broadest extent, Morris’s experimentation of anti-form does not aim at limiting his work to either construction of no form or against form in a literal sense; rather, he considers the object as a flexible site of construction and movement, and experiments through and beyond its limit, in that the felt piece constructs a dynamic space through the interrelationship and movement between the vectors of verticality and horizontality. The space, produced by the processes of spreading a linear pattern on the felt and suspending it on the wall, is not only flexible, transparent, porous and permeable in a conceptual aspect, but also blurs the conventional boundaries of the object. Morris’s exploration of the object through the politics of space, especially the interaction and connection between horizontal and vertical forces, forms a certain kind of mechanism of spatial transformation by transporting the object and space from horizontal to vertical, from material to immaterial, from past to present and from real to imagined. The emergence of conceptually and physically elastic and pliable sculptural installations reconfigures both the object and space, influenced by the simultaneous interaction between vertically pulling apart and horizontally spreading out. In terms of the transformation of power, for example, from territorializing force to deterritorializing force and from vertical force to horizontal force, it is important that installation cannot be confused with the power and spatial function of a given space, such as the politics of a museum or that of everyday life. Just like an artist, a museum, for example, produces and distributes knowledge, but the knowledge that is provided by the museum is different from that of the artist. This is because the artist’s knowledge, the work of



Installation and Spatial Politics

45

art, is transformed and reinterpreted according to the theme of the exhibition; once again, it becomes socially, politically, historically and culturally relevant. Through the form of exhibition, research, education and promotion, the museum collects, rearranges, reorders, recontextualizes and redistributes the knowledge for the public, the nation and the global, in order to engender a new greater understanding between people and worlds. While the museum is seen as a macro-system of aesthetic production, the work of art can be understood as a micro-system of aesthetic production that is an essential element of the formation of the museum. As opposed to the museum, which necessarily includes and utilizes works of art, a work of art does not have to have only an affirmative relationship with a museum or any other macro-system (of power). In this respect, in contrast with traditional installation art – which was made for the spectator to perceive the wholeness of the work through the system of accumulation – the installation in the regime of the sculptural, rather, functions by producing and activating a political zone, in and through which the pre-existing orders of a site encounter are challenged and reconfigured, by determining and systemizing the relationships of objects in a new order. Installation is the invention of the rule of spacing, which can be achieved by expanding the domain of the sovereign right of the artist through the reordering of power from the object to its surroundings in the dialectical logic of inclusion and exclusion, becoming non-environmental. In the realm of art, the object is recognized as a contested term, which has been constantly challenged and experimented with through different ideas and practices. One of the influential developments on the idea of the object is Marcel Duchamp’s use of the object. Duchamp chose and repositioned a white mass-produced porcelain urinal – which was signed “R. Mutt” and titled Fountain – and submitted it for the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917, but it was rejected and qualified as a non-art.47 In Passages in Modern Sculpture, Krauss approaches Fountain in terms of the principle of negation, particularly as opposed to the traditional visual differentiation, narrative and humanization of a work of art, by negating any formal decoding and analysis.48 An object can, therefore, be transformed from non-art to a work of art through the speculative act of posing questions. As Krauss argues, “Duchamp was clearly severing the object from that causal chain – whether historical or psychological – which we saw function in nineteenth-century sculpture.”49 Duchamp’s sculpture is seen as separated from its formal engagement with its (historical, social and psychological) spaces. Because of its nature of indifference, the object itself becomes, to use Robert Morris’s words, less self-important, whereas the beholder becomes more important as a tool for the formation of sculpture, capable of deconstructing and reconstituting the object through questions concerning the nature of art, for example, the definition of art and how things are known.50

46

Chapter 2

The operations of cause and effect or of a rational sequence of events, which we have seen as the touchstone of third-person narration, withers and dies as the viewer confronts the ready-made, sensing that it has dropped from nowhere into the stream of aesthetic time. Duchamp celebrated this demise with what he called “the beauty of indifference,” by which he expressed his determination to make art that was cut loose from personal affect.51 In Duchamp’s work, the creation of art is achieved only by two factors: the artist and the spectator. In other words, the spectator of a piece of art is considered as active an agent as the creator. In his essay “The Creative Act,” published in 1957, Duchamp claims, “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”52 The work of Fountain, therefore, becomes accessible and expressive not by Duchamp but rather by the spectator. Duchamp reduces the artist’s creative act, because he thinks that the artist’s act through the work of art cannot go beyond the level of pure intuition and therefore should remain within the state of the virtual or what he calls a “raw state.”53 For Duchamp, a work of art exists in the space between “the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”54 By contrast, the spectator not only comes from the exterior of the work, but also brings exteriority to the work of art. (In this case, the movement occurs from exterior to interior.) Moreover, the spectator has a special ability to transform a work of art from the virtual to the actual, entering into the zone of pure intuition. Therefore, it is not the artist but the spectator who can emancipate and actualize the pure state of the intention of the work, transmuting it as a particular form of expression. Duchamp’s sculptural strategy, applied to the work of Fountain, is definitely related to the transformation of the object from the transparency of intellectual interpretation to opaqueness. If the transparency of the work is understood as a clear causal relationship in the process of interpretation – which is frequently found in the hierarchical system of modern art – the opacity of the work can be linked to an attempt to break this fixed causality. From a spatial point of view, it is clear that Duchamp considers the urinal differently from ordinary objects, as he has chosen, repositioned and exhibited the object in a particular way. The difference created by displacing the object from its original place and relation makes it lose its given function and meaning. However, this artist’s act of displacing and repositioning the object seems to stay within the space of the virtual, until the spectator encounters it. In this respect, it is significant to reconsider Duchamp’s sculptural strategy – especially the coexistent yet contradictory relationship between the minimalized artist’s act and the active participation of the spectator in the production of a work of art – which cannot be reduced merely as a negative reaction to modernist art.



Installation and Spatial Politics

47

Duchamp’s idea of the transformation of pure intuition of the work of art from the virtual and the actual – which becomes possible through the act of the spectator – can be understood by looking through Kant’s transcendental theory of experience. In Kant’s transcendental idealism, we have a priori knowledge of the spatial and temporal forms of outer and inner experience, grounded in our own pure intuitions of space and time. Spatiality and temporality are, therefore, necessary conditions for operating pure intuition, rather than the object in itself. These are considered as a priori forms of knowledge, therefore, because they are not inherent in the property of the object, but must precede and structure all experience of individual outer objects and inner states. “The expression ‘an object is external to me’ can mean either that it is an object merely distinct from me (the subject) or else that it is also to be found in another location (positus) in space and time.”55 In this respect, objects cannot, therefore, be derived from direct experience, but intuited by the judgement of the subject of the spectator through a priori forms of space and time, because any such experience presupposes the individuation of objects in space or time. From Kant’s perspective, the perception of an object – for example, Duchamp’s Fountain – is not derived from things in themselves, but from the spectator’s a priori intuition of space and time. In other words, this has two implications. First, it does not mean that we perceive space as an infinite whole, but that space is given as unbounded and infinitely divisible. The use of unaltered mass-produced objects in Duchamp’s art production cannot, therefore, be considered merely as merging with the system and context of everyday life as an infinite whole. Rather, the object is separated not only from the individual creation of the artist, but also from the individual reception of a particular social class, such as that of the bourgeoisie. The object is detached from its contradictory social functions and activities, which protect a particular social class by projecting the better image of established orders and protesting against the transgressive force that threatens the existent orders. In terms of Duchamp’s logic of detachment, this transformation of the object from the contradictory social function to the realm of non-purposive creation makes the object speculative, concerning the territory and essence of art, and distinct from the representation of social order or the realm of the social. Second, Duchamp’s Kantian approach to the object, specifically, the negation of the emergence of the object from things in themselves, can be understood as a challenge to the modernist account of the autonomy of art. This means that the hierarchical power system of the object is changed from the determinism of the artist to the realm of multiplicity, in which external forces are allowed to enter the sovereign territory of the work of art and act dominantly to reorganize and actualize its established systems and relations, according to their own principles. From this anti-essentialist perspective, the

48

Chapter 2

object eliminates its sociopolitical position and action and is not treated as a whole in a certain context (of everyday life). This changes not only traditional ways of seeing a work of art – which is controlled by the object itself or the surface of the object – but also the subjective mechanism of a work of art from intention to realization. While the subjective mechanism of modernist sculpture is systemized under the logic of wholeness or totality – which is frequently controlled by the autonomous system of the object – Duchamp’s object makes a distinction in the sculptural process between intention (pure system) and realization. For Duchamp, the object is not a complete form of wholeness, because it is not automatically realized by the object itself. In this respect, the judgement of the spectator occupies a central place, mediating between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge or between the outer and inner experience of the object. The spectator becomes transcendental, and can travel back and forth between spatially discrete worlds, such as the external and internal spaces of the object. By transcendence, I do not mean simply moving from one place to another. Rather, the object is formed through the complex action of the external force. The spectator acts as a transformative force that creates a certain form of continuity between intention and realization of a work of art. This specific sculptural experiment by Duchamp has certainly influenced not only, to a large extent, the expansion and transformation of the knowledge of sculpturality and the object, but also the emergence of the conceptualist and minimalist turn of the 1960s. Since the appearance of the Duchampian ready-mades, objects have mainly been employed in constructing a sculptural work. From the 1960s until the present, especially in the course of the crisis of artist’s authorship, phenomenological ideas and theories have been dominantly applied to reading a sculptural object, by centralizing the perception or visual experience of the beholder in the formation of a sculptural work. However, this phenomenological idea has a certain tendency to reduce the meaning and function of the object, owing to its over-emphasis of the bodily experience of the beholder. From a phenomenological perspective, the works of sculpture tend to form two polarities, in comparison with the scale of the beholder. The small work is considered as a passive, closed, idealist, non-spatial entity, separate not only from its surroundings, but also from the beholder. The large work includes the beholder and space and frequently links to the concept of publicness. This twofold idea of the object can be found in Robert Morris’s description of sculpture. In his famous essay “Notes on Sculpture, 1–3,” originally published across three issues of Artforum in 1966, Morris conceptualizes new (minimalist) sculpture in relation to the notion of the object, particularly focusing on the problem of the size of sculpture and the viewer’s participation from a phenomenological perspective. In comparing the size of a sculptural



Installation and Spatial Politics

49

work with that of the human body, he divides sculpture into two types of spatial mode. One of these is sculpture in the intimate mode. According to Morris, this intimate mode of sculpture refers to small objects or ornaments; in describing this mode, he explains, “[It] is essentially being closed, spaceless, compressed, and exclusive . . . space does not exist for intimate objects.”56 Sculpture in this mode can form its aesthetic property through the pictorial approach, whose main methodology relies on what Morris calls “surface incident.”57 In the intimate mode, the meaning of spacelessness is, therefore, related to that in which the object is understood as a form of solidity, in and through which something cannot occupy or pass. From this respect, a viewer cannot enter into and penetrate a small object, such as a cup or a pen, because internal space is completely negated as an illusion. For Morris, if there is no physical involvement of the viewer, this implies that there is no space. Morris’s description of the intimate mode of sculpture can definitely be linked to the Greenbergian materialist perspective of sculpture, in which a sculpture confronts its literalist turn, whereby a sculptural work is read from an anti-illusionist perspective. In this respect, a sculpture in the intimate mode produces itself through its physical independence by negating any inherent quality of the object. The other is the monumental mode of sculpture. Morris defines this as an enormous object, which is physically larger than the body of viewer and therefore includes more of the space itself. This monumental mode of sculpture de-emphasizes surface incident, which is present in small objects. Rather, a structure is recognized as a key element for constructing a sculptural work. What Morris means by structure is “how a thing is put together.”58 Space becomes a constituent element of the sculptural, because the relationship between the object and space is crucial for a sculpture to function as an enormous object. Through the structural operation, the object turns to the non-personal or public mode.59 This public mode of sculptural structure cannot merely be identified with that of architecture, owing to its containment of space; rather, it escapes from the traditional relationship with architecture, which does not possess any independent constitution and is frequently understood as a decorative ornament, as a part of the system of architecture. For Morris, space – specifically the inclusion and exclusion of space – becomes an essential element in determining the type of an object. Minimalist objects tend to be body-sized, neither small nor enormous, fitting between Morris’s two different realms. This change does not simply denote a transformation of the physical size of object, but indicates the shifting idea of the relationship of a sculptural work with the spectator. The objects – that are employed in minimalist sculpture – produce a holistic spatial system, through which one particular rule of perception is applied to structure our action and relationship in the logic of indivisibility. In addition to classification in terms

50

Chapter 2

of scale, the minimalist object differentiates itself by occupying the space between a modernist account of autonomy and a Duchampian idea of indifference, rather than simply negating them. A significant factor of constructing the object that minimalists focus on is spatial systemization. For example, in his large plywood sculptural work L-beams (1965), Morris presents three identical L shapes in different positions relative to the ground. Instead of using a particular unaltered ordinary object, such as Duchamp’s urinal, the work presents a simple, geometrical and systematic form of the artist’s visual expression, which has been rejected by Duchamp’s logic of indifference. This visual expression is not in the surface of the work or in the reference of the other. Rather, it is in the particular form and pattern of space, which is divided and connected by the relationship between the three L-shaped constructions and the installed space. In Morris’s minimalist objects, space is seen not as inherent, but as negative. This negative space can be defined as a space that surrounds the objects, rather than the object itself, which can be carved or shaped according to the exterior form of the work. As Morris emphasizes the negation of inherent space, this negative space plays an important role in the production of minimalist sculptures. The negative space surrounding the objects is not void; rather, it can be operative, when the spectator enters into the space. Therefore, the continuity between different viewpoints of the moving spectator is considered a fundamental factor for constructing and operating this negative space. In contrast with the transition from the immanent space to the exterior space in the Duchampian object, the minimalist spatial systemization, for example, in the work of Morris, is fundamentally grounded on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, which is seen as a method of connecting us with the world beyond both traditional empiricism and rationalism. Minimalism focuses on the temporal and material aspect of the body (of the spectator), rather than on the immanent dimension of the object. From a phenomenological perspective, the body is a medium for perception of the world, through which our action and expression can be determined. Rather than seeing the body or bodily experience as simply a physical entity, Merleau-Ponty describes it as a complex zone, in which subject and object coexist and interact with each other. In this sense, for Merleau-Ponty, the traditional system of thought, such as Descartes’s concept of cogito, has a certain limitation in its failure to recognize the fact that the concept of body can be expanded beyond the problem of the dualist relationship between subject and object. Perception can be achieved through the space of experience. Spatiality is, therefore, a fundamental element that makes perception possible. Space can be defined as a form of experience, rather than as a physical container that can occupy objects. The relationship between the object and space can be made by the experience of the body. Merleau-Ponty argues that the body



Installation and Spatial Politics

51

requires a pre-setting for its perception, which means that our perception is not pre-given, but can be obtained or formed by our bodily experience.60 This pre-setting can be understood as what Merleau-Ponty calls the phenomenological layer, which makes pure transitions possible. “We shall need to conceive a world which is not made up only of things, but which has in it also pure transitions.”61 For Merleau-Ponty, this pure transition indicates the “unity and indivisibility of temporal waves,” whereby different elements can be related in a certain form.62 In the same temporal waves, simultaneity or presentness is a precondition to connect such differences, for example, the subject with the object. The experience of perceiving a subject or the body certainly influences and participates in the production of visibility, which relates not only to how we perceive the world, but also to how our world is known and how the knowledge of classification is organized through the bodily experience. In The Visible and the Invisible, published posthumously in 1964, MerleauPonty provides the concept of flesh as an important notion of his theory of phenomenology, particularly focusing on the relationship between the visible and the invisible. In his idea of flesh, the visible is seen as the surface of flesh, and the invisible is connected to the idea of depth of flesh.63 In other words, the visible and the invisible become connected through flesh, in that flesh is not understood as a corporeal obstacle, but rather as a conceptual tool, that is, a certain type of (philosophical) passageway, which enables the visible and the invisible to encounter in the same line. In terms of the concept of flesh, Merleau-Ponty specifies invisibility in the following terms: The invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework (membrure), and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only within it, it is the Nichturpräsentierbar which is presented to me as such within the world – one cannot see it there and every effort to see it there makes it disappear, but it is in the line of the visible, it is its virtual focus, it is inscribed within it (in filigree).64

The invisible is covered by the visible, which means that the invisible is able to exist and be approached only within and through the visible. This secret and strange domain (of the invisible), as Merleau-Ponty explains, not only “inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility,” but is also considered as a latency of being that can be reached through the principle of visibility, whose ability is “to see further than one see.”65 When thinking of his notion of invisibility, Merleau-Ponty attempts to re-evaluate the notion of perception, body and the visible by situating them between the biological and the psychological as a primordial spatial level, which is capable of producing a transcendental experience. The

52

Chapter 2

flesh links between the seeing and the seen or the touching and the touched through the logic of reversibility or exchange. As Merleau-Ponty claims, “The seeing is not without visible existence.”66 His concept of invisibility, however, can be considered as an extended version of materialism, in that the invisible – the “in-visible” in his terms – can exist only within and through the visible.67 His idea, therefore, tends to prioritize the notion of visibility, which is described as “a palpitation with the look,” “the first vision” or “the whiteness of milk,” whose significance has been given to achieve “the establishment of level in terms of which every other experience will henceforth be situated.”68 It is only through this primordial level that the invisible, in other words, the idea or the “secret blackness of milk,” can be successfully accessed and therefore made available, because Merleau-Ponty considers the invisible as a “second positivity.”69 As he argues, “The invisible is not the contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework . . ., and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only within it.”70 Merleau-Ponty separates his idea of the invisible from Kantian absolute invisibility, in that he considers the invisible as the other side of the visible or, in his own words, the “reverse of its specular perception” or the “concrete vision,” which can be formed only by the disappearance of the spectator or the principle of the visible.71 Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s theory, a particular visual system or principle of visibility can be recognized in Morris’s minimalist sculpture, in terms of the continuity of viewpoints of the moving body. Morris’s object produces a spatial systemization through its simple, unitary art form, which leads the spectator to focus less on the formal relationships between different elements. Morris argues that this simple form of sculptural object provides a particular relationship with the spectator by offering a maximum resistance to perceptual separation. In the system of minimalist sculpture, the object seeks its meaning not from the inside the object, but rather from its surface through the viewer’s interaction with the object. This emphasizes the real space that both the object and the spectator occupy. That space can be produced in the process of shifting the centre from the object to its perception and to its situation. However, the experienced and perceived variables are not simplified by the spectator, but ordered by the unitary system. Morris understands the function of the unitary system through a perceptual relation to two aspects of gestalt: cohesiveness and indivisibility. If the predominant, hieratic nature of the unitary form functions as a constant, all those particularizing relations of scale, proportion, etc., are not thereby canceled. Rather they are bound more cohesively and indivisibly together. The magnification of this single most important sculptural value – shape – together with greater unification and integration of every other essential sculptural value



Installation and Spatial Politics

53

makes, on the one hand, the multipart, inflected formats of past sculpture extraneous, and on the other, establishes both a new limit and a new freedom for sculpture.72

Morris emphasizes the unitary form of sculpture, which is distinct from the multipart form. A multipart form is not only composed of but also understood by parts. It can be linked to the part-by-part sculptural form, as claimed by Judd.73 In this multipart form, a spectator needs to maintain a certain distance, separating from the objects, because the spectator does not act as a part of the work in the logic of the wholeness. The perception of the spectator relies on the hierarchical distribution of the parts. A hierarchy among the work’s constituent elements has a tendency to achieve a form of balance between parts and thereby creates a weak gestalt by diminishing visualization and decentring the structure of power.74 On the contrary, as Morris argues, sculpture involves unitary forms, “being bound together as it is with a kind of energy provided by the gestalt.”75 A unitary form of sculpture is conceived of as a situation that includes the spectator within its totalizing system. This totalizing system of the unitary form produces a strong gestalt, whereby all the elements and powers converge towards a form of continuity. The unitary form is based on the logic of indivisibility, which can be achieved by the immediacy of perception or the bodily experience of the gestalt. The gestalt is essential in the production and operation of immediacy, owing to its exhaustion of information by changing the spectator’s position relative to the work.76 As a body of the sculptural work, the spectator is affected by the non-hierarchical structure of the spatial system. The elimination of parts in the unitary system, therefore, implies that the spectator can relate with the whole, rather than the parts, and will undergo a more encompassing experience, determined by the interaction between the object, the space and the spectator. However, when considering recent sculptural practices, for example, Sarah Sze’s The Uncountables (Encyclopedia) (2010), Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (2003–2004), Anish Kapoor’s Non-Object (2010) and Svayambh (2007) and Isa Genzken’s Münster sculpture project (2007), it is obvious that the notion of the object within contemporary sculptural production has changed. The phenomenological framework can no longer be a precondition to the reading and production of a sculptural work, in that it has a certain limitation to thinking of the active function of space and objects, related to the expanded understanding of the beholder and the sculptural (table 2.1).77 The reasons for this are twofold. First, the phenomenological understanding of the beholder – which has been at the very heart of sculptural communication since the 1960s – tends to diminish the importance of the shift of the relationship between the sculptural work and its environment, particularly

54

Chapter 2

Table 2.1  Changes in the Relationship between the Beholder, Space and Object in the Realm of Sculpture Art

Modern

Beholder Passive Space

Spaceless

Object

Autonomous, representative and symbolic

Duchampian Active

Minimalist

Active yet homogeneous Speculative Systematic (distinction yet holistic between (negation of immanent and immanent external space) space) Indifferent and Less passive self-important

The sculptural Critical or conflictual Productive and destructive (conceptual and practical) Political

the transformation of space or regime. Specifically, on the global stage, the exhibition of a work of art or the circulation of art from one place to another is seen as an international phenomenon. Rather than being experienced only bodily, a work of art can be encountered and distributed simultaneously from many places, using various forms of access, such as the internet, YouTube, magazines, books and television. In this respect, the bodily experience of the beholder – who is regarded as a dominant figure in the theory of phenomenology, capable of constructing, determining and even completing the territory of a sculptural work – becomes less important. Second, space cannot be reduced merely to a detachable element that can be included in or excluded from any sculptural practice, even where the size of the work is extremely small, as, for example, the works of Tom Friedman: Untitled (Fly) (1995), Untitled (Self-Portrait) (1994) and Untitled (Bubblegum) (1990). This is not only because space here does not literally imply a physical space that a viewer can enter, but also because a sculptural object becomes directly connected to the site in various ways, owing to its emancipation from the pedestal and from its decorative and symbolic role in the architectural system. In this respect, my idea of the expanded concept of the object is incompatible with the phenomenological understanding of the sculptural object, for example, that of Morris, which is composed of the intimate object (non-spatial) and the enormous object (spatial). The beholder and space are already considered fundamental constituent elements, which cannot be removed from the production of a sculptural work. In this respect, I would like to develop further; not only to find and explore a new element that can illuminate and rebuild the meaning and function of the beholder and space from a different perspective, but also to expand the concept of the sculptural to include a conceptually and practically combined method of engagement between the sculpture and its environment. To achieve this, I focus on particular examples of sculptural practice, which



Installation and Spatial Politics

55

were presented by Sarah Sze, in a solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, in 2010. In this exhibition, Sze presented several installation works, which fill and transform two entire gallery spaces. Like her other works, Sze’s installations in the exhibition use found objects, such as tea bags, cups, plastic bottles, lamps, and wooden shelves, which can easily be collected from our surroundings, to construct a fragile yet monumental structure; by placing an object between other different objects, she creates a certain balanced tension. Explained through the titles of the works – for example, Encyclopedia, Portable Planetarium, Landscape for the Urban Dweller (Horizon Line) and Imposters, Fillers and Editors (Liquid to Solid) – Sze’s works develop the meaning and function of the object particularly through the concept of space. In 360 (Portable Planetarium), for example, collected objects are released from their pre-ordained conceptual and material functions and used in the system of everyday life and transformed into constructive elements or through a sculptural method that participates in the structuring of a new space. This space is real, neither imaginary nor illusionary, and is composed and operated by the political relationship between the object and the space. In Sze’s work, this real space is certainly different from the literalist space seen in minimalist sculpture, as literalist space is considered a situation, produced by the distance between object and subject. As Fried argues, “It is [the beholder’s] situation. . . . Literalist works of art . . . must . . . be placed not just in his space but in his way.”78 The literalist space or situation is controlled by the perceptual principle of the beholder. Under this control – which is non-relational, unitary and holistic – the objects are enabled to function in the space.79 However, the real space in Sze’s installation forms a critical relationship with the object and the beholder, as the logic of fragility systemizes that space; in this logic, the space becomes a locus of disorientation. It is the politics of fragility that enables the interrelationship between objects. Rather than being identified simply with ephemerality, the concept of fragility – specifically, the fragility of relationship and of materiality – has been utilized in a more complex way: on the one hand, it is divisible and destructive; on the other hand, it is indivisible and constructive.80 Sze’s work is more focused on a productive and expansive aspect of fragility in the transformation of space, for example, from a gallery space to a sculptural space. “This piece belongs to a series that’s about systems, impossible systems of information, where you know that the information is more than you can actually encompass. It’s also about the fragility of information. When I was asked to do something for the end of the show I thought it was an impossible order.”81 By de-emphasizing the traditional modern sculpture’s self-referential, spaceless and gravitational aspects, an expanded understanding of the materiality, space, production and relationship of the object is established in a new

56

Chapter 2

mode of spatialization, which is the politics of fragility. In the politics of fragility, Sze’s installation transfers the stability of still life into the dynamics of power, energy and mobility, becoming a landscape. Unlike minimalist sculpture, the formation and distribution of power or energy does not rely completely on the perceptual experience of the spectator. While a spectator tends to form a relatively simple perceptual trajectory in the minimalist holistic system of space, in Sze’s work, the spectator cannot be freed from the problems of disorientation, complexity, unexpectedness or instability. In other words, Sze’s work seems to disorient the spectator, even deconstructing the way the spectator actually perceives space, simply because the spectator is required consciously or instantly to choose a way to enter into the work, encountering and dealing with the impossible order of the space. In this way, the political relationship between the object, the space and the logic of the sculptural is emphasized in determining and constructing a territoriality of sculptural practice. In this respect, the formation, transformation and redistribution of power relations can, therefore, be an important factor in the production of a sculptural work and the expansion of the territory of the object. The political system of 360 (Portable Planetarium) can be found in and produced through the particular role of the object and its relation to the space. Sze’s work is structured and systematized not by the principle of a unitary system, but by the logic of fragility. In the logic of fragility, a political role or function is assigned to the objects, enabling one to visualize and actualize the work in the reconfiguration of existing systems and orders in a space. Drawing on a practical idea of architecture – particularly derived from “how the structure of a building is revealed or how architectural ornament conceals this structure”82 – an object acts as a structural axis, which sustains or shifts the entire sculptural piece. However, in Sze’s works the objects are not merely utilized as structural and functional objects. Sze transforms this architectural element into another form – which she calls a “contrived installation”83 – under the new logic of space or the sculptural. Sze’s work explores and visualizes fragility in the built space, which, of course, encompasses everyday life, architecture, urbanism and landscape. Through the logic of fragility, Sze’s work creates an opportunity for finding and proposing a new method of thinking, connecting and operating a space or the built environment through and beyond existing spatial limits and restrictions. This is made possible through a conflict or negotiation with the dominant system of the space or existing spatial authority. In the regime of the sculptural, the object becomes a political agent, whereby a new role or function of the object is allocated, which means that the object not only has power, but also becomes able to exercise that power, through the construction of a continuity between discrete ideas and things. This political function of the object is certainly related to the problem of the legitimacy, organization, distribution and mobility of



Installation and Spatial Politics

57

a particular place. In installing an object, a tension between two different forces is built. The one is a sovereign power that intends to break the old law, for example, the principle of fragility. The other is a reactive power that attempts to return to the old law, such as the existing system of a given space or the rationality of architecture. The change of the authority of a regime not only affects the reconfiguration of power relations and structures, but also brings about the emergence of revolution and violence against the old order. At the highest level, the objects address the political and social conditions of the day, but they also question the meanings and significance of spaces, territories, their users, politics and that relation to the logic of the sculptural, specifically the transformation from the regime of the ordinary space to the regime of the sculptural. In Sze’s installation, space – specifically, its use, production, territoriality, transformation and fluidity, as well as its relationship with its users and occupation – is central. Sze explores the production of space by proposing a new system of spatialization, in and through which the art can reside and pass. This system of spatialization is operated by the object, which is certainly differentiated not only from the Duchampian object, but also from the minimalist unitary spatial system. This is because objects in the Duchampian and minimalist concepts tend to seek meaning mainly through a mediative element, that is, the perception of the spectator, who can build the body of the object, rather than the object itself. The objects in such works function as passive forms, and their space is limited, to exclude the space from the object or to include the spectator’s external space in the work of art. However, considerations like these seem insufficient in understanding the changing meaning and function of sculptural work and the object, because sculptural objects cannot be read simply through the traditional relationship between the static object and the moving spectator in the dominion of the system of temporality, specifically by connecting many different viewpoints through the unitary law, which is produced by the bodily experience of walking along the negative space of the sculptural work. After the transition from the death of the autonomy of the artist to the birth of the spectator in the 1960s, a new tendency of sculptural works finds a new stage, which definitely lies beyond the object’s dependence on its spectator, specifically, the linear relationship between the static, motionless sculptural object and the active, moving spectator or between the perceiving and the perceived. An important aspect that makes Sze’s arrangement of found objects a work of art is definitely its relationship with its environment or the urban in terms of politicality. The traditional understanding of the politicalization of art – that it utilizes art as a tool for delivering a political idea to change the world, such as bill amendment – reduces the meaning and value of a work of art absolutely to a monolithic system of action, which is also very boring and

58

Chapter 2

naïve. To make matters worse, if the art as a political tool cannot achieve its purpose, the work will be considered a dead loss. Distinct from this politicalization of art, the reassembled objects in Sze’s work become a work of art in the politics of installation, particularly in its production and distribution of a complex function and movement in the system of life. To understand this, I would like to focus on two examples of Sze’s sculptural practice, Imposters, Fillers and Editors (Liquid to Solid) (2010) and Landscape for the Urban Dweller (Horizon Line) (2010), which were installed in the archive library and the second floor of the gallery for the exhibition. Certainly, different forms of spatial politics can be found in these two sculptural practices. Sze distinguishes these two forms of spatial politics as imposter and impossibility.84 In Imposters, Fillers and Editors (Liquid to Solid), Sze focuses on the idea of occupation by dealing with the potentiality of space, such as the negative space of plastic bottles, containers and bookcases. Plaster cast objects – Sze calls them “dead objects” or “imposters” – invade and occupy the spaces in the bookcases in the library.85 These objects replace books’ spaces, placing themselves between the books. As Sze explains, “It’s a specific moment in the show where the work literally weaves in and out of the real life archive of the gallery.”86 The work invents and proposes a particular method of occupying – of filling and editing – a space, whereby the space can be reinterpreted, utilized and systemized according to a new spatial principle. This spatial principle allows the imposters –the plaster casts, which do not belong in the space – to have a chance of disorienting or even threatening the existing order and function of the built space or the law of collecting. The converted forms of the containers are obviously different from unaltered objects, which are utilized in Sze’s other practices, as they actually frame the negative space. These ghostlike objects tend to be faded out from the site of installation and conversely illuminate the objects and spaces in the realm of everyday life from a different perspective, particularly by contrasting with and drawing parallels with the site. The imposter or the object presents and actualizes its transferrable value or function through and beyond binary opposition, transforming the site from the potential into the expressive, and asking how we perceive and understand things and spaces. Landscape for the Urban Dweller (Horizon Line), by contrast, explores and presents a different mode of spatial politics. Blurring the distinction between exhibition and studio or art-making space, the installation site or urban space acts as a laboratory of the sculptor, in and through which the artist experiments not only with the object, but also with the system of the object, including its territorialization, production, construction, deconstruction and ordering. In the second floor of the main gallery, Sze constructs her installation on-site, deploying not only domestic objects, but also office objects and construction materials, such as soil, plants, water, a fan, lamps,



Installation and Spatial Politics

59

bricks and sticks. This installation is not a static construction; the fan creates a certain movement and energy in the space, animating the objects. In spite of the fact that Sze draws many practical ideas from architecture and science, a sculptural work cannot merely be identified as an architectural or scientific model. Such a model indicates a miniature or replica of something and is an essential checking method for the next task, to reduce any mistake in the process of producing the final work. If a model is a step in the process of actualization or a problem is found in the model, then the model should be changed or amended by enlarging or even destroying it. This work, rather, illuminates the space or the city in which we live, particularly concerning its evolution and transformation. The city is seen not as a static container, in which all the materials and products can reside. Like an organic creature, it constantly changes, grows and disappears. In this respect, Sze seems to focus on proposing a particular perspective on the transformation of contemporary urban space. In Landscape for the Urban Dweller (Horizon Line), the work is installed from the ground to the glass ceiling and connects them. Urban space can be understood as a horizon, where different things and ideas can encounter each other. Sze’s installation presents this horizon of urban space, particularly focusing on the politics of balance. Like her other installations, in this work, a space is created by placing and interconnecting different objects horizontally and vertically, so that the construction can be structurally sustainable and expand in all directions. Sze’s installation focuses on the fragility of the contemporary urban condition, which means that every connection made in the space can easily be changed, destroyed or constructed. This monumental piece, constituted by small everyday objects, creates a precarious balance and tension between heterogeneities. For example, the objects, animated by a fan, threaten the stability of the structure. What interests me here is that each object is active and operative, and sustains the whole structure of the piece in a contradictory relationship between fragility and balance, producing an impossible order. In considering the process of art making, the organization of the objects is not completely planned, but produced improvisatorially, depending on the condition and process of building the site. As Sze states, “The work is constantly shifting, so you read it as one thing, and then it gets lost and you read it as something else, and then that gets lost, so it’s never a set system.”87 Sze’s work transforms a given space into a horizon, systemizing it in a new logic of space. The site becomes vulnerable and mutable. In the transformation of space, Sze’s work explores the improvisational quality of cities, labour and everyday life. In considering these particular examples of sculptural installation, I focus on the mode of spatial politics or sculptural engagement with the environment, which does not reduce a sculptural work to the environment or vice versa. This engagement with the environment may not be divided into the

60

Chapter 2

dualistic idea of inside (non-urban practice) and outside the gallery space (urban practice). Rather, it is important to consider ways in which a sculptural work participates and transforms its environment conceptually or materially. An artwork’s participation in its environment can be achieved not by a simple, utopianist action, but by its complex process of spatialization.88 This complex process of spatialization can be understood as re-mapping existing conditions of space conceptually or materially, particularly modes of occupation, production and territorialization of space. Influenced by Gordon Matta-Clark, Sze’s works derive from “how people think about space in the city [and] how space becomes dead or alive.”89 Sze’s perception is that “the built world is incredibly fragile, is on the edge of ruin, and it’s all potentially a set trap.”90 In this respect, a space – which is occupied, destroyed and constructed by the objects – does not represent and is not identified with the system of urban space. The artists, rather, build a new space. This is the construction of “fragile utopias that never reach completion and always threaten to come apart.”91 In these fragile utopias, the installation of objects functions as a de-territorializing force that reconfigures the existing systems and relations of power. Through the process of spatial reconfiguration, the object becomes art, creating a new tension between the absolute sovereign power and the revolutionary and violent power. By looking at Sze’s installations, the expanded role of sculptural object certainly goes through and beyond conceptual actions – which represent or address current political and urban issues and subjects as a form of art – or phenomenological actions that spatialize the project’s surroundings according to the bodily engagement in the field of perception. To provide an expanded understanding of the objects, I focus, rather, on the transformation of regime, that is to say, from the regime of the ordinary space to the regime of the sculptural, particularly concerning ways in which the traditional passive condition of the sculptural object can be expanded and can transcend the boundary of art, dissolved into its environment, by participating in the process of reconfiguring existing spatial movements, orders and relations in the given space. I emphasize the necessity of a new transformation of ideas in thinking about the concept of sculpture and the object, which not only provides an opportunity to read a work of art from a different perspective, but also proposes a new method of sculptural (de-)territorialization, connecting a sculptural object to its environment. This attempts to extend the territory of sculpture through a combined approach of conceptualization and materialization. What I mean by the expansion of territory is the intervention or invasion of a given space not only through the construction and distribution of a new relation and movement, but also through the deconstruction and reconfiguration of existing spatial orderings and rules. Therefore, the expanded concept of the sculptural object – which I would like to explore in this section – is not the execution



Installation and Spatial Politics

61

of a speculative action or a mixture of one structure with another, but the participation in the potential and actual transformation of space, producing a new possibility of the form of life through a complex engagement with the environment, without reducing one to another. My argument is, therefore, derived from the premise in which the sculptural object is not produced, and does not function, according to the fixed causality, based on the mechanism of dominion by the experience of the spectator. Instead, I recognize the productive possibility of the gap between (1) a sculptural object, (2) the mode of installation and (3) the environment. This gap of space cannot be structured or composed in a certain phenomenological form simply through totalization or homogenization as an ambiguous situation, produced by the bodily movement of the beholder. The traditional view of the object considers the beholder as an idealist unitary element, as a part of the body of work, rather than as a conflictual factor, which can form a political relationship with the object. Instead of the passive role of the object in the phenomenological framework, what is significant in the concept of the object is that a sculptural work focuses on discovering or developing ways in which the object is produced by and produces its environment. To consider the changing meaning and function of the sculptural object – including its relationship with the spectator and space – I focus on the political dimension of the object, which plays an important role in the production of the sculptural, particularly through its organization of the space or gap between a sculptural object, the mode of installation and the environment. Politics refers to the mode of spatial systemization, which activates the operation of the machinery or networks of organization, so that different elements and relations can be connected in a new systematic circumstance. Politics and object are inseparable, not only because politics are immanent in the object, but also because the expanded notion of the sculptural is not confined to the phenomenological status of art object. Instead of the conscious agent of the spectator, it is the space that makes the object distributable and sharable and even the object’s relationship with politics possible and creates effects. The idea of politics is, therefore, important, particularly in considering what makes the object political, and vice versa; how it performs in the process of the production of the sculptural; and how the concept of the object and the sculptural can be urbanized in terms of politics and space, expanding the sovereign right of the artist from the object to the space. Following this reasoning, I attempt to rethink the meaning and function of the object and its relation to the expanded concept of the sculptural by focusing on the concept of politics, which plays an important role in considerations of the space or gap between a sculptural object, its mode of installation and its environment. In other words, an important factor that differentiates a sculptural object from an ordinary object is its politicality. Politics can be

62

Chapter 2

a sculptural method that can produce a new relationship and fluidity in the spaces between the three elements that I discussed: the object, installation and space. Rather than reducing politics merely to the politicalization of art – which usually conveys political subjects or acts as an agency for a political action or expression – politics as a spatial dynamism make a particular form of relationship with its environment by operating itself according to two different yet inseparable principles: equality and distribution. It is the continuity of these two functions that makes politics possible and effective. Jacques Rancière’s theory of politics is useful in understanding these two functional aspects of politics of the sculptural object. In his text Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Rancière argues: “Politics, indeed, is not the exercise of, or struggle for, power. It is the configuration of a specific space, the framing of a particular sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and as pertaining to a common decision, of subjects recognized as capable of designating these objects and putting forward arguments about them.”92 Rancière focuses on the interrelationship between politics and aesthetics. In his theory of politics, Rancière understands politics as distinct from a conflict between class struggles in the pre-established power structure. For Rancière, politics can be actualized when the excluded emerges to find and establish its identity by visualizing itself as legitimate and effective. This means that politics functions in and through a struggle between the established social order and those excluded from that order. Politics, for Rancière, is separated from the concept of police or a police order, which he considers as existing social rules and conventions.93 This police order determines not only the distribution of roles in a given space and the forms of exclusion that operate within its frame, but also the borders between the visible and the invisible, the sayable and the unsayable, the audible and the inaudible.94 “Politics is the very conflict over the existence of that space, over the designation of objects as pertaining to the common and of subjects as having the capacity of a common speech.”95 Rancière understands politics as a form of dissensus, by which he means that it is an activity that penetrates socio-cultural forms of hierarchies by introducing new subjects and systems into the field of perception.96 Dissensus is not simply a reconnection of existing relations of power in a different way. Rather, it is seen as a form of disturbance that produces and is attained by a new form of equality, changing the existing state of equilibrium. In The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière makes two important claims about equality. First, equality is seen as a condition of a new relation to knowledge and the transmission of politics.97 Equality produces politics when it encounters a specific form of dissensus.98 Through the logic of dissensus, equality can make a certain relationship with the non-political or the excluded. In this



Installation and Spatial Politics

63

respect, it is inevitable that equality conflicts with the established order of identification and classification. Second, a new relation to knowledge – which is provided by equality – creates a new circumstance for equality. As Rancière argues, equality participates to “provide a totalizing account of the population by assigning everyone a title and a role within the social edifice.”99 Equality can, therefore, be seen as a spatial production, in that the new relation to knowledge brings about a spatial reconfiguration by new orders and organizations. In the regime of the sculptural, the system of the object or, specifically, the political dimension of the object cannot be identified with that of everyday life. This means that the sculptural object plays an important role as a form of excess, not only transcending its material and social givenness, but also constructing a new diagram of spatial disposition and movement, which can be attained through a particular engagement with its surroundings. Therefore, my claim is that the sculptural – in which objects are employed as a key method of actualizing a new spatial mechanism – constantly discovers and produces a new political function, which acts to reconfigure not only the relationship between the inclusion and the exclusion, but also the map of experience, objects and subjects in the field of perception, particularly according to the logic of equality. Through the political function, an object can attend to the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of its surroundings by enacting a certain order and law. The sculptural space is not a privileged idealistic form of territory that can be exempted from the application of a particular law, empowered by the space it occupies, but it works in and through a real space as a form of contraction, whereby a new spatial law can be legitimate and affect existing spaces, relations and orders. This contradictory form of the sculptural space acts as the excluded part in the system of dominion in the space of commonality and returns to reterritorialize that space. However, it does not mean that a work of art is equalized with its use only for the political purpose of exercising an actual legal force or effect in the sociopolitical arena of debate, to control a particular geographical space or people. The sculptural space as a form of life generates an opportunity to enter a new relationship with established ideas and systems of order and classification. This chance can be a point of departure, from which a new form of order can be distributed and installed. Sculptural space – which is composed of and operated by objects – is, therefore, not stable, but conflictual in itself, not only because the artwork’s act of sovereign violence becomes crucial in producing an opportunity, but also because to enforce a new law is inseparable from breaking a previous one. The installation of the object can be interpreted as the act of opening the closed space of an artwork to all the people, or the dēmos, rather than to a single subject or a particular group of individuals, such as the bourgeoisie.

64

Chapter 2

In this sculptural space, the political act of privatizing a space is transformed into a platform for distribution. In the traditional idea of sculpture, a work of art is considered a symbolic territory of autonomy, which is frequently used for a political purpose by representing a certain subject matter to be delivered downwards. In this traditional regime of sculpture, the spectator is considered excluded, separated from the work of art. In other words, the spectator remains in his or her own territory without participating in the sculptural space. In the 1960s and 1970s, the spectator becomes active, changing from the excluded to the included, participating and even completing the body of the sculptural work in the logic of equality. However, in the contemporary condition of sculptural production, the structure that determines a certain form of sculptural practice – which has mainly been composed of two poles of the relationship between the work of art and the spectator – has been changed. After the return of the spectator as the included part, the spectator is not considered an expatriate, who leaves his own territory of legitimacy and enters the space of sovereign control as a foreigner within the frame of a foreign law. In other words, as a component of the work of art, the role of the spectator is seen to be less critical. Therefore, the expanded concept of the sculptural seeks for a new element, specifically a role of space in the logic of equality. A sculptural work can be recognized as the sovereign territory of the artist. But it is a different form from that found in the period of modernist art or what I call the period of the absolute sovereignty of sculpture, in the sense that it does not aim to possess its own territory, having full control within a territorial area or limit. The border of the sculptural territory, therefore, functions in two contradictory modes: protecting and transgressing. This means that a new form of sculptural work becomes possible, when it enters a certain form of relationship with its surroundings, or, specifically, its encounter with the power and space of the excluded. In this respect, the power of equality in the new regime of the sculptural is exercised through the space of inequality. The space of inequality is seen as a state of division or classification, in which a particular law is enacted to determine something excluded. On the contrary, equality can be understood as the return of the excluded as a form of inclusion. A sculptural work not only shapes urban space, but that urban space itself interacts with various forms of inequality, which attend to the production of exclusion. What is important here is the way in which a sculptural work relates with the exclusion, which is inherent in the urban space or the environment. To produce and install a sculptural work, the artist necessarily enters a particular given space, such as an institutional space or a non-institutional space, which is obviously not possessed and controlled completely by the artist. The artist must negotiate with the authority of that space in order to achieve the sovereign right to create a work of art in and through



Installation and Spatial Politics

65

that space. Performance works might have more freedom regarding this kind of negotiation. However, in the regime of sculptural work, to have a certain form of agreement to enter and use a particular space is a precondition, because a sculptural work is necessarily installed in a particular constructed place, which already has its own law and system of order. By entering the given space, the artist can act as a legislator or a sovereign of that space. In and through this practical condition of the space, the artist can install a new political order or law in the space through the work of art. The political order – provided by the artist – can be new in that it does not belong to the space in which it is installed, or is excluded from it. Therefore, it is inevitable that this will bring about a certain form of conflict in the relationship between different orders, for example, in the regimes of the sculptural and of urban space. To install sovereign violence of the sculptural in the established space and order can be the condition of inequality that makes a sculptural work possible and a new order emerge. This can also be the point: that I claim a sculptural practice as a form of urbanism. In Rancière’s theory, the aesthetic dimension of politics is provided particularly through the emphasis of the notion of distribution.100 He focuses on the way in which roles and modes of participation in a common social space are determined by establishing its relationship with the police order.101 Politics cannot be separated from the logic of policing. Distribution implies the re-mapping of inclusion and exclusion. In other words, politics includes a certain relation to the police order, a challenge to the established order in the logic of equality and in the attempt to bring about a reconfiguration of the distribution of the sensible. The social order is, for Rancière, thus defined as an anti-democratic, static, hierarchical structure, which attempts to maintain the existing system of inclusions and exclusions.102 The police order does not aim to destroy the act of politics completely; rather, a certain form of politics can be actualized through the police order, having and operating a particular organizational system of classification that re-divides the space into different positions and functions. Rancière understands distribution in terms of the police order as a system that can define “modes of being, doing, making and communicating that establishes the borders between the visible and the invisible, the audible and inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable.”103 As Rancière claims, “Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility.”104 A work of art is considered as a mode of doing and making a certain type of order, which includes not only the act of determining and maintaining the rule of the visible, the sayable and the audible, but also the act of suspending the ordinary system of order. This mode of doing and making can be regarded as politics, particularly regarding its act of distribution. Politics, particularly its

66

Chapter 2

function of spatial configuration, is, therefore, recognized as being necessary in understanding and establishing the regime of the sculptural. Politics generates a new set of relations, which can re-map existing orders and relations both conceptually and materially. In the territory of the sculptural, the object acts as a political agent in expanding the domain of the sovereign right of the artist from the object to its environment. According to his or her sovereign freedom, an artist has the right to create a work of art, without belonging to or being controlled by any existing systems of order and classification. This artist’s sovereign right legitimates the work of art in and through the common space. In this respect, accompanying the concept of production, distribution plays a significant role in the process of the legitimation of a sculptural work. In recent sculptural practices, the sculptural work cannot be reduced merely to a de-authorized or decentred form. Rather, a sculptural work produces and is operated by a particular form of politics. It organizes a complex relationship between heterogeneous elements and ideas, such as politics and police or equality and inequality, by its own rule and order. Therefore, to make the law of the sculptural legitimate, a sculptural work should maintain the law. In this sense, a sculptural work needs a certain form of authority and centre, which is definitely different from that found in a repressive system. Rancière argues that the police order is inseparable from the concept of politics.105 In his theory, the role of police is a paradoxical concept, which not only supervises the operation of certain laws, but also participates in the process of the production of laws. In the regime of the sculptural, the sovereign right of the artist can be regarded as an anti-democratic force of police that protects its territory from the return of the previous order. To protect its territory, the sculptural work needs to install a new law to systemize and protect that space in a certain way. This sovereign act of installing a law operates violently and revolutionarily, because it brings about a clash, when it confronts the reactionary force that constantly attempts to return to its old domain. However, this resistant form of force cannot be removed completely from the space by the new law, so that the space is always in the possibility of change. To maintain this tension between the sovereign form of the work and the form of ordinary experience is to be the sculptural. In short, as Rancière argues, “Art and politics do not constitute two permanent, separate realities,” because, “One valorizes the solitude of a heterogeneous sensible form, the other the gesture that draws a common space.”106 Politics can be understood as a spatial dynamism, which has a capability to produce a certain form of visuality through the politics of the object. In other words, the relationship between the politics and the object is the decisive factor of being a work of art. My understanding of the object, hence, focuses on its act as a dispositif or a system of action that reconfigures existing relations and orders of a site or surroundings. The object can be seen not only as a perceptual cause and outcome, but also as a strategy for passing the space



Installation and Spatial Politics

67

between heterogeneous elements and for re-mapping their relations and movements. Space is the precondition of being a sculptural work, because the object transits to its surroundings, owing to its transcendent tendency of defying the condition of being an object. The object participates in the process of the production of spatial mode or strategy, which can provide and maintain a certain system of order and knowledge in engagement with a particular space. Art objects are composed with contradictory political powers, through which, on the one hand, a new order of inclusion and exclusion is produced in the logic of equality and, on the other hand, the new order is distributed in relation to the system of the world. The political function of the object is essential for establishing and distributing the singularity of a work of art, because it is politics that allows an object to be systemized, operated and therefore active in the world. Politics is, therefore, inevitable for the production of the sculptural. Through the political function of the object, a sculptural work can enter a given space and re-map the existent systems and orders of the space, according to the principle of equality and distribution. Equality can be understood as the enforcement of an artist’s sovereign freedom. Distribution is to expand this sovereign force of the artist in engagement with its environment. I, therefore, emphasize the condition of being an object as presenting a new mode of spatial continuity with the surrounding world. Through the process of interaction between politics and object, a sculptural work can be transformed as a new form of life, which is able to produce a certain form of visibility, materiality and thought. NOTES 1. Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), 6. 2. In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant describes the notion of space and time: “Time is the formal a priori condition of all appearance generally. Space is the pure form of all outer appearances; as such it is limited, as a priori condition, to just outer appearances. . . . If I can say a priori that all outer appearances are in space and are determined a priori according to spatial relations, then the principle of inner sense allows me to say, quite universally, that all appearances generally, i.e., all objects of the senses, are in time and stand necessarily in relations of time.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), 34. 3. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Montana: Kenssinger Publishing, 1996), 91. 4. Ibid., 104. 5. Ibid., 110. 6. Ibid., 112. 7. Paula Feldman, Alistair Rider and Karsten Schubert, eds., About Carl Andre: Critical Texts since 1965 (London: Ridinghouse, 2006), 27.

68

Chapter 2

8. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 153; my emphasis. 9. Ibid., 154. 10. Ibid., 155. 11. In my opinion, Fried’s description of this indefinite relation to the space or situation seems unclear and therefore problematic, in that he overlooks the system of sculptural space that necessarily exists with and is operated by the concrete interrelationship between sculptural object and space. Hence, a viewer’s relation to the space cannot be simply reduced to something indefinite or uncertain, as Fried argues. 12. Ibid., 166–67. 13. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (London: MIT Press, 1986), 280. 14. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004), 346–64. 15. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), 40. 16. Ibid., 43. 17. Ibid., 44. 18. Ibid., 40; my emphasis. 19. The definition of the internal does not relate to the matter of interiority and exteriority. As Deleuze and Guattari assert, “A difference can be internal.” The internal, rather, means a dynamic space, capable of producing differences, situated between heterogeneous elements (such as immaterial and material). Deleuze and Guattari, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 2004), 29. 20. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue, “Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become expressive, or of milieu components that have become qualitative. The marking of a territory is dimensional, but it is not a metre, it is a rhythm. It retains the most general characteristic of rhythm, which is to be inscribed on a different plane than that of its actions.” Ibid., 348; my emphasis. 21. Jamie “Skye” Bianco, “Techno-Cinema: Image Matters in the Affective Unfolding of Analog Cinema and New Media,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia T. Clough and Jean Halley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 51. 22. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 543; my emphasis. 23. Ibid., 545. 24. Ibid., 545. 25. Ibid., 559. 26. Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 18. 27. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 2005), 92–93. 28. James Meyer, “The Functional Site; or, the Transformation of Site Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 25; my emphasis. 29. “Despite the prevalence of the word ‘Environment’ in exhibition reviews beginning in 1959, it did not appear in The Art Index until volume 18, November 1969



Installation and Spatial Politics

69

to October 1970. There, for the first time, ‘Environment (Art)’ appeared. The first issue of The Art Index that lists installations is volume 27, November 1978 to October 1979. Under ‘Installation,’ the researcher is advised to ‘see Environment (Art).’” Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Space of Installation Art (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001), xi–xii. 30. Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 92. 31. Ibid. 32. Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (London: Routledge, 2000), 108. 33. Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 10. 34. Ibid., 10. 35. Ibid., 5. 36. Ibid., xxvii. 37. Ibid., xxviii–7. 38. Press release for the exhibition of Environments, Situations, Spaces, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, 1961, quoted in Reiss, From Margin to Center, 38. 39. Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, xi–xii. 40. Suderburg, Space, Site, Intervention, 4. 41. Ibid., 3. 42. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 353–54. 43. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 270. 44. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 56. 45. “With its pedestal removed, sculpture was free not only to descend into the materialist world of ‘behavioral space’ but also to ascend into an idealist world beyond any specific site.” Hal Foster, “The Un/making of Sculpture,” in Richard Serra: Sculpture, 1985–1998, ed. Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art and Göttingen: Steidl, 1998), 17-18. 46. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 98; my emphasis. 47. Faye Ran, A History of Installation Art and the Development of New Art Form: Technology and the Hermeneutics of Time and Space in Modern and Postmodern Art from Cubism to Installation (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009), 65. 48. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1981), 80. 49. Ibid., 81. 50. Ibid., 79. 51. Ibid., 81. 52. Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” Art News 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957), 28–29. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 401; my emphasis.

70

Chapter 2

56. Morris argues, “The size range of useless three-dimensional things is a continuum between the monument and the ornament. Sculpture has generally been thought of as those objects not at the polarities but falling between. The new work being done today falls between the extremes of this size continuum. Because much of it presents an image of neither figurative nor architectonic reference, the works have been described as ‘structures’ or ‘objects.’” Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture 1–3,” in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthropology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 830–31; my emphasis. 57. Ibid., 831. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), 294. 61. Ibid., 320. 62. Ibid., 321. 63. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 143. 64. Ibid., 215; my emphasis. 65. Ibid., 151. 66. Ibid., 143. 67. Ibid., 215. 68. Ibid., 134–47. 69. Ibid., 112. 70. Ibid., 215. 71. Ibid., 249. 72. Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 830. 73. In his essay, “Specific Objects,” Judd argues, “Most sculpture is made part by part, by addition, composed. The main parts remain fairly discrete. They and the small parts are a collection of variations, slight through [sic] great. There are hierarchies of clarity and strength and of proximity to one or two main ideas. . . . The parts are usually subordinate and not separate in Arp’s sculpture and often in Brancusi’s. Duchamp’s ready-mades and other Dada objects are also seen at once and not part by part. . . . Part-by-part structure can’t be too simple or too complicated. It has to seem orderly.” Ibid., 826–27; my emphasis. 74. Ibid., 830. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. In this section, modernist, Duchampian and minimalist perspectives are particularly considered, not only because they provided a significant understanding of the concept of beholder, space and object in the history of art, but also because it is useful to clarify the idea of the sculptural in comparison with some different ideas. However, I do not intend to limit the concept of the sculptural only relating to modernist, Duchampian and minimalist ideas and practices, but to further expand it by differentiating from other perspectives. 78. Fried, Art and Objecthood, 154; my emphasis.



Installation and Spatial Politics

71

79. Ibid. 80. “Beyond Infinity,” John Haber in New York City, accessed 18 May 2013, http://www.haberarts.com/sze.htm. 81. Stephanie Cash, “The Importance of Things: Q+A with Sarah Sze,” Art in America, 12 October 2012, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/ previews/sarah-sze-high-museum/. 82. Phong Bui, “Sarah Sze with Phong Bui,” The Brooklyn Rail, 6 October 2010, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/10/art/phong-bui-with-sarah-sze#. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Stephanie Cash, “The Importance of Things.” 88. The works of Joseph Beuys’s 7,000 Oaks (1982) and Olafur Eliasson’s Green River (1998–2001), for example, can be seen as a utopian action, because these works have a tendency to be urbanized, by utilizing urban space itself, finding a compromise with urban reality as a part of urban design or representing an ecological question or issue through a form of art in a literal sense, rather than functioning themselves as a political entity that potentially or actually transforms an existing system of orders, relations and movements, by creating a new connection between a sculptural work and its environment. In this respect, I consider these works as environmental art. This is distinct from what I mean by an artwork’s participation in its environment. 89. Joyce Beckenstein, “Fragile Balances: A Conversation with Sarah Sze,” Sculpture 31 no. 6 (September 2012), http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag12/ sept_12/fullfeature.shtml. 90. Phong Bui, “Sarah Sze with Phong Bui.” 91. John Haber, “Beyond Infinity.” 92. Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 24. 93. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 53. 94. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 3. 95. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 24. 96. Rancière, Dissensus, 2. 97. Ibid., 52. 98. Ibid. 99. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 89. 100. Ibid., 12. 101. Ibid., 89. 102. Ibid., 85. 103. Ibid., 89. 104. Ibid., 13. 105. Ibid., 70. 106. Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, 25.

Chapter 3

Deleuze, Space and the Sculptural

Any struggle to reconstitute power relations is a struggle to reorganize their spatial bases.1 “Having a room of one’s own” is a desire, but also a control. Inversely, a regulatory mechanism is haunted by everything that overruns it and already causes it to split apart from within.2

In “The Un/making of Sculpture,” published in Richard Serra: Sculpture, 1985–1998 in 2000, Hal Foster claims, “The biggest break in the history of sculpture in the twentieth century . . . occurred when the pedestal was removed . . . with its pedestal removed, sculpture was free not only to descend into the materialist world of ‘behavioural space’ but also to ascend into an idealist world beyond any specific site.”3 The perception of sculptural practice in the contemporary condition of art production has changed, specifically, sculpture’s expansion into and as a site, the transformation from the autonomous regime of monumental sculpture to the differential vector of the sculptural. A sculptural object is considered not as a thing in space, but as an important aesthetic methodology, which participates in the production of a new tension in existing relations and movements of things and spaces. This tension is not an antagonism between heterogeneous elements, but an emergence of a new spatial relation and rhythm, which is produced by the object and its critical relationship with surroundings or real spaces. This is a precondition for being the sculptural.4 It is, therefore, significant to consider the transformation of sculptural practice, particularly by recognizing and unfolding the change and expansion of the understanding of the relationship between the object and the space from an interdisciplinary perspective, rather than limiting it within the autonomous boundary of art. 73

74

Chapter 3

1.  DWELLING AND SPACE In the expanded concept of the sculptural, space is no longer reduced to a theoretical and systematic framework, such as a void container for events or a physical or metaphysical entity: rather, it can be conceived of as an important operational method and process, whereby the new relations of production and power can be formed constructively and destructively by returning to an existing space and system. This expanded concept of space – which is a main concern that I aim to explore and provide in and through the reconstruction of the sculptural in this study – is certainly linked to the dynamics of space and its participation in the production of a thing, concept, power and knowledge. This spatial dynamism is composed of and operated by two opposite yet symbiotic modes of spatialization, which are essential formative elements that necessarily participate in the process of production and deconstruction of a particular (conceptual and material) form, relation and movement. The significance of this dialectical aspect of spatial dynamism is that it can develop the virtual process of spatialization on the one hand – which can be conceived as the movement through and beyond real spaces – and the actual process of spatialization on the other – which can be related to mapping real spaces. These contradictory modes of spatialization (of the sculptural) can be clarified through the concept of dwelling, particularly by looking at the interrelationship between different spaces: dwelling space and transit space.5 Here, dwelling is understood and functions spatially. The concept of dwelling has mainly been dealt with in Heidegger’s phenomenological works, which focus on the way in which people exist in relation to their world, in his word, “being-in-the-world.” In Building, Dwelling, Thinking, Heidegger argues, “Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.”6 For Heidegger, the problem of being in the world is inextricably bound up with the question of dwelling. Heidegger argues that the dwelling is related to the end and building is the means to that end.7 To understand the meaning and relationship between dwelling and building, Heidegger draws on the old English and High German word for building, buan, which signifies “to remain, to stay in a place.”8 Heidegger emphasizes that this definition of building is identified with dwelling. According to Julian Young, in late Heidegger’s work, dwelling is understood as “ontological security,” which is incompatible with (radical) insecurity.9 Young emphasizes two conditions of dwelling, which can be cared for in the dwelling-place without risks or danger on the one hand and care for things of the dwelling-place on the other.10 The security or homeliness of dwelling can, therefore, be achieved by the act of being cared for and caring for a place, separating it from the foreign, which does not care for the place. This Heideggerian dwelling is possible through gathering the fourfold within



Deleuze, Space and the Sculptural

75

a certain boundedness, rather than through entering into the insecurity of the foreign or death. Young argues that dwelling is a kind of unconditional and “absolute security, the attempt to overcome death.”11 I, however, hold two contradictory views on Heidegger’s notion of dwelling. A positive aspect is that Heidegger considers dwelling as a spatial notion by claiming that dwelling is “to stay in a place.”12 Heidegger’s account of space is considered an essential constituent element for the formation of dwelling, which is surrounded by a certain boundary, thereby differentiating a space from another. For Heidegger, space also means a room, which is necessarily cleared and free, so that things or ideas can be securely let into and settle within the space. In relation to Heidegger’s concept of space, dwelling plays an important role particularly in the relationship between man and space. Dwelling is to exist in a (human) manner on the earth, rather than to form a part of the character of human being. It is also conceived of as a method of producing a certain type of existence or of allowing for the space of presenting. Dwelling is a higher concept, which includes the space; but not all the spaces thoroughly participate in the notion of dwelling, as dwelling divides dwelling space from non-dwelling space. “To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this spring and preserving.”13 However, a certain kind of limitation is found in Heidegger’s idea of dwelling. Although he attempts to expand the definition of dwelling by combining it with the notion of building, Heidegger’s dwelling is still considered within a traditional idea of shelter, which provides a place of peace, protection, stability, construction, settlement, occupation, staying, at-homeness, preservation, care, community. Building aims to actualize this space of dwelling. Heidegger argues that dwelling involves the gathering of the fourfold – earth, sky, people and a sense of spiritual reverence, or the gods, as he signifies higher realities.14 In this sense, dwelling is more than an extension of our existential space or place; rather, it becomes a fundamental tool through which both being and space can find a certain form and clarification. According to Heidegger, dwelling space is separated from non-dwelling space, that is, transit space, such as bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations, railway stations and highways, and dams and market halls, which are classified into building or built things.15 Heidegger insists that dwelling is essential for the formation of the relationship between human beings and space, as dwelling “preserves the fourfold by bringing the presencing of the fourfold into things.”16 Dwelling enables a space to appear through a thing, which is seen as a location that gathers or assembles the fourfold in its own manner. The idea of belonging or being inward is, therefore, significant in Heidegger’s abstract concept of dwelling, because the manner – in which

76

Chapter 3

a thing or building remains, provides a site for gathering and belongs to a dwelling – forms a powerful mechanism of “being-in-the-world.” Distinct from Heidegger’s perspective, my idea of dwelling space and transit space could help to define the expanded concept of the sculptural by providing a tension between a political understanding of dwelling and the Heideggerian idealistic notion of dwelling. From a political perspective, “dwelling space” does not mean the production of a space of permanent residence.17 Rather, it transcends a place for protection or settlement – which is completely embedded in the realm of “ontological security” and moves according to the line of internal consistency – as it necessarily accompanies and reacts to the idea of transit space. I consider transit space as the destructive aspect of spatial systemization, which penetrates and extends an existing space through the process of becoming transitional, using roads, bridges or tunnels. It allows a space to encounter another space, by dissolving any kind of distinction or limit. In many cases, something constructed needs to be destroyed in transit space. This is what I call the destructive method of construction in the sense that it tends to provide the new by transgressing previous spatial limits. In this respect, the expanded idea of dwelling definitely needs an accompanying concept of transit. Dwelling space is the constructive aspect of systemization, which does not mean building a place of permanent and stable settlement in a traditional context. It is, rather, considered the production of temporal spatial limitation, which exists to be trespassed, destroyed and expanded, rather than to protect, stay or occupy a place permanently. Hence, dwelling is a complex and contradictory spatial system, which inextricably combines with notions of displacement, relocation, unrootedness, disturbance, removal and replacement. Dwelling space and transit space are not completely separate, but constantly merge into one another by acting on and reacting with each other towards moving into a new spatiality. In the process, a space cannot be released from the dialectical state of being constructive and destructive. The interactive relationship between dwelling space and transit space, therefore, functions as and produces a changing spatial continuum by activating its contradictory yet interactive spatial systems in constant relation to the space of everyday reality. Dwelling space and transit space are not opposites, but they move and operate constructively and destructively through the politics of space. 2.  THE STATE AND THE WAR MACHINE Through the work of Deleuze and Guattari I aim to provide a new understanding of the concept of space and its political dynamism in terms of the notion of dwelling, by exploring and expanding the meaning and function of



Deleuze, Space and the Sculptural

77

the state; specifically, its complex relationship with the concept of the war machine. To achieve this, it is significant to approach the concept of the State from a spatial point of view. Rather than being passive and static, space is considered a contested zone, which conceptually and materially produces and changes itself according to the different movements of spatialization: the smooth space of nomadology and the striated space of the State.18 Here, Deleuze and Guattari do not propose and claim the notion of the State simply in terms of a traditional idea of anti-state or anti-authoritarianism. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the State is described thus: One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space . . . “the political power of the State is polis, police, that is, management of the public ways,” and . . . “the gates of the city, its levies and duties, are barriers, filters against the fluidity of the masses, against the penetration power of migratory packs,” people, animals, and goods. Gravity, gravitas such is the essence of the State. It is not at all that the State knows nothing of speed; but it requires that movement, even the fastest, cease to be the absolute state of a moving body occupying a smooth space, to become the relative characteristic of a moved body going from one point to another in a striated space.19

The state, for Deleuze and Guattari, is viewed as a force of anti-production or the unproductivity of space, which operates to prevent the flows of creative force.20 In the process, a certain type of form can be produced and the expansion of difference is limited. The state moves against the productive or creative power and event of the war machine, that is to say, the process of heterogenization, which can be formed and connected to others towards the outside of the regime of the state. This productive movement of the war machine constantly generates differences, which are fundamentally related to the politics of desire or, in Deleuze’s terms, a “desiring-machine” that is immanent in the war machine and potentially or actually forms the force of productivity, transcending existing boundaries of a territory.21 By contrast, the state operates to restrict the formation and movement of hierarchical assemblages; it tends to obstruct the emergence of singularity by creating the striated space of unproductivity. In particular, the state produces a space of homogeneous concentration, in and through which a central power exercises a dominant and active force, which holds and controls transit spaces, such as roads and bridges. The formation of horizontally different kinds of (social) flow and relation can be regulated within this striated field of order. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari focus particularly on the overcoding of the state, which is conceived as “the operation that constitutes the essence of the State, and that measures both its continuity and its break with the previous formation.”22 This operation works spatially and determines the

78

Chapter 3

homogenization of different fragments or elements through the built environment according to principles of “centering, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization and finalization.”23 The overcoding of space is seen as an action of the state that distributes central powers and governs different flows vertically through its stable structures. The operative role of overcoding develops the mechanism of interiority, in and through which political sovereignty can be exercised. The apparatus of the State is a concrete assemblage which realises the machine of overcoding of a society. . . . This machine in its turn is thus not the State itself, it is the abstract machine which organizes the dominant utterances and the established order of a society, the dominant languages and knowledge, conformist actions and feelings, the segments which prevail over the others.24

The war machine is, by contrast, considered a form of assemblage or the politics of the outside, which has a tendency to act against the formation and operation of the state. It exercises a transformative force to weaken the concentrated power of sovereignty of the state by penetrating the striated space of verticality through the dynamics of the smooth space of horizontality. According to Deleuze and Guattari, war is not the aim of the war machine.25 The war machine constantly moves towards the “deterritorialization” of the hierarchy of the state or the state-form, creating a new space of difference. For Deleuze and Guattari, the contradictory yet interactive relationship between the anti-production of the state and the production of difference is necessary for generating a creative movement. This creative movement can be achieved only through going beyond the rigidly fixed and anti-productive space of the state. In this respect, the meaning and function of the war machine are crucial in its production of nomad vectors and the actualization of transformative potentiality through an established space.26 And each time there is an operation against the State – insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, or revolution as act – it can be said that a war machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has appeared, accompanied by the reconstitution of a smooth space or a manner of being in space as though it were smooth (Virilio discusses the importance of the riot or revolutionary theme of “holding the street”).27

The war machine does not aim to annihilate the state, but transcends and expands a given territory in and through the invention of a creative method and flow.28 This transcendental movement of the war machine in the sense of crossing over its boundary is important in the production of a creative method and flow, because it does not follow a binary opposition. In other words, it means that the war machine proposes a completely different way of relating



Deleuze, Space and the Sculptural

79

to heterogeneous elements. It can exist and produce itself in its conflictual relationship with the dynamics of differences. Not only does the significance and aim of the war machine, especially its participation in the operation of deterritorialization, relate to a transformative vector – which is immanent in a given territory – but also a revolutionary movement produces the potential or actual possibility of change. Deterritorialization overcomes fixed relations by entering into new assemblages. It is a process of becoming, which can be achieved through an act of undoing what has been done especially against the production of governed organizations and stable flows of power.29 In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari claim, “The process of deterritorialization . . . goes from the center to the periphery, that is, from the developed countries to the underdeveloped countries, which do not constitute a separate world, but an essential component of the world-wide capitalist machine.”30 In this respect, the war machine maintains a revolutionary yet continuous movement between different spaces and forces, rather than simply either a nihilistic or a chaotic transformation. This nomadic movement goes through the transition or flow from the centre to the periphery, in other words, by becoming deterritorialized, in which revolutions continue in the process of transformation from one form of authority to another. Drawing on this contradictory relationship between the state and the war machine, dwelling refers to the politics of space that enable to territorialize, produce, reorganize, deconstruct and displace a space in and through the interrelationship between desire and control. Dwelling space can, therefore, be understood as a locus of generating new spatial assemblages or networks, rather than as a concrete institution or a political form, which aims simply to control other institutions and organizations and exercises political domination by occupying a particular space through the traditional logic of power. The importance of dwelling that I would like to explore is its functional aspect. It is a part of space that creates a network between different spaces. More precisely, dwelling provides a new regime of space, through which a certain rule or system of spatial governance can be legitimized. Unlike Heidegger’s phenomenological state version of dwelling – which has a tendency to protect the internal logic of territorialization – the political state version of dwelling in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea is necessarily correlated with the process of becoming transitional via non-dwelling spaces, such as roads, bridges and tunnels. Becoming transitional (or using transit space) is not understood simply as moving from one place to another as through a passageway. It is rather the act of transformation, expansion and becoming. While dwelling is seen as a constructive mode of action, through which an inventive strategy of networks and circulation can be provided, transit space is a destructive mode of action, which not only experiments, challenges or even threatens the existing regime and limit of dwelling space, but also affects the pattern

80

Chapter 3

of movement in a tension between sovereignty and institutional freedom by entering into a new spatial network. Transit space is not thoroughly governed by the regime of dwelling space, because it is much more complex and unpredictable in essence. It is a space of encounter and transformation, which never escapes from coalitions or conflicts between different forces and spaces. It invents a new pattern of movement by amending the law of dwelling space according to the relationship between heterogeneous elements. It allows various demonstrations by the anti-despotic force, which will become a rebel army to protest against the dictatorship of the regime of dwelling space. Transit space constantly discovers and develops a chance for new change, revolution and uprising, because it does not aim to occupy, construct or protect its own territory. It is the politics of discontent or dissensus. The driving force of transit space exists and is activated when a certain conceptual and material point becomes divergent. It is the necessity for a revolutionary movement of space, whereby new connections between different elements or spaces can emerge. This violent force of transit space can never be completely removed and will always be mobilized at a certain point. In this respect, instead of remaining within a certain static logic of space, an occupied space is understood as a temporary regime, which necessarily changes itself, interacting with the movement of the external force. Because of its fundamental relation to the space, the concept of dwelling needs to form a bridge between idea and the space or urbanism, which can also be essential for understanding the expanded concept of the sculptural. In relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the state, the sculptural concerns an aesthetic, urbanist and philosophical question and problem of space in terms of the concept of dwelling by exploring a potentially productive line of thought, including not only the production of sculptural practice, but also the (re)development of political potentiality through the space of everyday life or urban space. In addition to the notion of the war machine, I recognize particularly the concept of the state and its relation to urban space or urban revolution, which is essential for understanding spatial production, transformation and movement of the sculptural. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the urban revolution does not signify a lineal historical evolution from an agricultural to an industrial to an urban world, but refers to a shift in the internal organization of the formation and change of the city. “It is not the country that progressively creates the town but the town that creates the country. It is not the state that presupposes a mode of production; quite the opposite, it is the state that makes production a ‘mode.’”31 The urban revolution and the state revolution are different, but coexistent. In terms of the logic of power, urban power emerges from diversity and difference, rather than an orderly segregation. State power can be decisive and therefore produce a certain type of mode (of production) through the conflictual relationship with the built environment,



Deleuze, Space and the Sculptural

81

specifically, urban territory and urban power. In contrast with the movement of urban power – which provides circuit points through the formation of horizontal lines – state power forms vertical and hierarchical aggregates and networks.32 The state makes the urban interact with the rural through the process of stratification. Deleuze and Guattari focus on the relationship between state activities and urban space by distinguishing the state from Marx and Engels’s theory of the state, in which the state is considered a system of political domination or an instrument of the bourgeoisie.33 In addition, the Marxist notion of the urban – which is reduced simply to the urban–rural dichotomy in terms of not only an expression of the division of labour, but also class antagonism in society – is redefined as a dynamic deterritorializing force that constantly discovers and interacts with others.34 For Deleuze and Guattari, it is clear that power goes beyond the state as well as the binary opposition between the urban and the rural. This is because the movement and formation of the power of the state and the urban relate to the dynamics of space, which works through the contradictory spatial modes of “two potentials, one anticipating a central point common to two horizontal segments, the other anticipating a central point external to a straight line.”35 In this sense, the urban acts as a network of circulation, whereby something passes or penetrates through different spaces, producing a new connection and flow, rather than remaining within a (conceptually or physically) peaceful shelter.36 This circulation operates itself through the logic of “transconsistency,” which needs a connection with the outside or other points.37 By contrast, the state invents an internal circulation, exercising its own principle of “intraconsistency” over different points, which are gathered by the power of the urban.38 The state makes these different points hierarchically internalized in a certain way. Being sculptural is to produce its own space, which is already political in itself. In widening Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, it is, therefore, important to focus on the political dynamism of space in the production of a sculptural work, particularly in relation to the idea of the interdependence between the concept of dwelling space and transit space. This contradictory idea of space is essential for understanding the contemporary condition of sculptural production, particularly its relationship with its environment, which makes itself differentiated from the traditional concept of sculpture. Sculptural work’s inclusion of space cannot be simplified as having enough room for the spectator’s physical perceptual experience, which becomes a dominant power of constructing and even completing a work of art. It is, rather, the sculptural work’s control over the space, whereby a new spatial law is created, legitimated and distributed in the site. The spatial law of the sculptural practice enables to achieve the right of occupation, deconstruction and use of the site. In this respect, the reconfiguration of existing relations, systems and orders becomes an essential part of the process of sculpturalization, in which a

82

Chapter 3

dynamic force of spatial action can develop – or further construct or destroy – an existent space, entering into a new relationship. In the process, a sculptural work necessarily attends real space or the political system of everyday life. However, this does not mean that the sculptural work is completely absorbed into and controlled by that space, because the space and the sculptural are not identical. Through the complex relationship between the logic of dwelling space and transit space, a sculptural practice develops and actualizes its political potentiality through and beyond limits and boundaries of the built environment. This political dimension of a sculptural practice makes the work expressive and critical, by changing the geography of spatial relations in the interaction between the homogenizing despotic movement of space and the reactive revolutionary movement of space. The role of a sculptural work is the invention of new mode of politics, which can build potentially productive yet critical dimensions of space, by redeveloping a given space (or urban space under capitalism).

NOTES 1. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 238. 2. Gilles Deleuze, “The Rise of the Social,” in a foreword of Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Family: Welfare versus the State, translated from the French by Robert Hurley (London: Hutchinson, 1980), xvii. 3. Hal Foster and David Sylvester, Richard Serra: Sculpture 1985–1998 (Los Angeles: Steidl, 2000), 179–80. 4. Not all the sculptural practices participate in this condition of the sculptural, as the sculptural produces and transcends itself in and through the complex relationship with its surrounding spaces. Hence, it does not include the self-referential mechanism of monumental sculptural practice or the modernist account of utopian space. However, the sculptural does not aim to destroy or separate those kinds of sculptural practice completely; rather, it functions as the politics of the outside, which constantly develops and proposes a different way of unfolding and relating to them. 5. The concept of invisible territory or the relationship between the invisible and territory can also be approached by these two interrelated modes of spatialization: dwelling space and transit space. 6. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971), 158. 7. Ibid., 144. 8. Ibid. 9. Julian Young, “What Is Dwelling? The Homelessness of Modernity and the Worlding of the World,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus Volume 1, ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000), 189.



Deleuze, Space and the Sculptural

83

10. Ibid., 129. 11. Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 145. 12. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 147. 13. Ibid.; my emphasis. 14. Ibid., 149–51. 15. Ibid., 143. 16. Ibid., 149. 17. Rather than identifying it with a specific political party or system, what I mean by the political is related to the formation, movement and distribution of power, which transforms, in other words, displaces or reassembles existing forms of thought and practice by providing a new mode and relation of production, not merely defines what and how things are. 18. Heidegger, Building, Dwelling, Thinking, 388. 19. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004), 433–36; my emphasis. 20. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe the unproductivity of the State: “Tamerlane is the extreme example. He was not Genghis Khan’s successor but his exact opposite: it was Tamerlane who constructed a fantastic war machine turned back against the nomads, but who, by that very fact, was obliged to erect a State apparatus all the heavier and more unproductive since it existed only as the empty form of appropriation of that machine.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 462; my emphasis. 21. Ibid., 441. 22. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum, 2004), 217. 23. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 46. 24. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogue II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 1987), 97; my emphasis. 25. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 460. 26. Ibid., 404. 27. Ibid., 426. 28. Ibid., 460. 29. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 349. 30. Ibid., 251–52. 31. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 473. 32. Ibid., 478. 33. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argue, “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. . . . Political power . . . is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2009), 9–27. 34. Marx and Engels do not explain very much about the concept of the urban in their works, but briefly imply, “The antagonism between town and country begins

84

Chapter 3

with the transition from barbarism to civilization . . . runs through the whole history of civilization to the present day. . . . The town already is in actual fact the concentration of the population, of the instrument of production, of capital, of pleasures, of needs, while the country demonstrates just the opposite fact, isolation and separation. The antagonism between town and country can only exist within the framework of private property.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Part One, with Selections from Part Two and Three and Supplementary Texts, edited, with an introduction, by C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers Co., 1970), 69. 35. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 479. 36. Ibid., 477–78. 37. Ibid., 477. 38. Ibid., 477–78.

Chapter 4

Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

A sculptural practice is inseparable from a space or the city – which is now a broader term, encompassing different concepts, such as the environment, landscape, architecture and everyday life – owing to its occupation in and production of a real space. Since the sculpture has been removed from its pedestal or base, it is obvious that the relationship between a sculptural practice and the space has become even more complex. However, my study does not aim to argue that a sculptural work is derived from the urban and merges with it as a single unity, because the sculptural mode of thinking, practising and becoming urban certainly differs from modes of everyday life, capitalist space or the built environment. Rather, the most significant point that I would like to investigate in this chapter is how to understand this complexity in the relationship between the sculptural and the urban, without reducing the relationship into a single unitary spatial system, simply blurring all differences and distinctions. To achieve this, first, it is necessary to look at a particular scene or idea of changing urban space, which includes the transformation of not only the private sector, but also the cultural sector. 1.  THE PRODUCTION OF URBAN SPACE AND THE LOGIC OF CAPITAL The true issue is not to make beautiful cities or well-managed cities, it is to make a work of life.1

The expanded concept of sculpture, or what I call the “sculptural,” is no longer confined to the field of art, but is considered as an urban aesthetic. This is not only because the sculptural is place-making, rather than – as 85

86

Chapter 4

traditionally interpreted – object-making, but also because this place-making is completely related to invading or, in other words, constructing and deconstructing the conceptual and material territory of our reality through the spatial politics of a sculptural object. Taking a new step in thinking about the notion of the sculptural is significant because a sculptural work not only generates the new through its body, which is absolutely beyond a physical object itself, but also transforms an object’s relation with its surrounding space, including the space itself. A sculptural work is, of course, not merely identified with the space itself, but produces a new spatial strategy by directly or indirectly affecting and being affected by its surroundings (for instance, Gabriel Orozco’s Yielding Stone, in 1992, and Michael Asher’s Sculpture, in 1977, 1987, 1997 and 2007). In this sense, space is significantly considered as a body of and a key formative factor of a sculptural work. This can be understood by shifting the current idea of sculptural practice, specifically, through the transformation from the traditional concept of sculpture to the expanded notion of the sculptural, which can be established by the politics of space or, in other words, by transcending an object’s given territory and reconfiguring its spatial relations and movements. Here, the space is definitely related to a certain aspect of the (capitalist) space of urbanism or urban restructuring, whereby various spatial, social and political conditions for the survival of individual lives can be formed and unformed, including particular patterns of spatial arrangement, organization, movement, relation and human behaviour. The sculptural that I claim in this study develops a new form of possibilities of urbanism, which not only provides an opportunity to think about the complexities of our reality from a new perspective, but also establishes the role and function of the sculptural in the urban environment. How does capitalism survive and why is it so crisis prone? . . . Capital is not a thing but a process in which money is perpetually sent in search of more money. Capitalists – those who set this process in motion – take on many different personae. . . . Continuity of flow in the circulation of capital is very important. . . . Any interruption in the process threatens the loss or devaluation of the capital deployed. . . . The circulation of capital also entails spatial movement.2

In considering the capitalist space of urbanism, the concept of capital has recently become much broader; it includes not only the (material) form of produced things, but is also presented in various terms such as human capital, knowledge capital and creative capital. In Marxian theory, capital is described as a dynamic social relationship, distinguished from other factors of production such as land, labour and so on.3 It is, hence, not immanent in things or spaces, but causes the determination of social action by penetrating through and transforming them. David Harvey pointed out that Marx did not



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

87

consider this notion of relation of capital with the space theoretically or politically appropriate. “Marx . . . excluded specific consideration of the spatial fix on the grounds that integrating questions of foreign trade, of geographical expansion, and the like, into the theory, merely complicated matters without necessarily adding anything new.”4 Harvey provides two different but interrelated aspects of capitalist spatial transformation to understand the logic of capital. The one is the internal transformation of capital within a given territory under a certain spatial rule. This internal transformation is related to capital’s expansionary movement of reproduction. The other is the external transformation through the movement of (surplus) capital beyond the existing boundaries of the space in which it was originally produced. Drawing on Harvey’s two perspectives of capitalist spatial transformation, what I mean by “capital” is a productive agent, which necessarily participates in the conceptual or material movement, relationship and formation of space in the process of urbanization. Space acts as an essential element for the internalization of capital, through which a particular form of territorial power can be generated and structured according to the logic of consistency. This can be called the process of territorial specialization, in which all the differences and contradictions can be connected in a certain way. By contrast, capital can be considered as a differential vector, which can constantly provide an opportunity to produce and search for a new space or market. The formation of space or market is one of the most significant elements or strategies for the survival of contemporary global urbanism because it is through the space (of market) that capital flows and a profit is generated. This can be seen as a socio-economic dimension of space. In the same vein, urbanization is always in the process of development and change, because of its relation to the unstable and elastic nature of capital.5 It is important to look at and expand a particular point of (capitalist) urban movement, which is frequently considered as the negative aspect arising from the competition of urban space; for example, the unequal distribution of wealth between the rich and the poor concentrated in urban milieus. However, rather than considering the negative as a complete annihilation, I intend to rethink this dark side from a different perspective, focusing particularly on the inventive methodology of developing urban space and the dynamics of production through the overcoming of crises, as well as the significance of the meaning and function of space. In addition, the role and function of uneven and conflicting dynamism of space and its relation to the production of urbanization under capitalism provides important points of the expanded concept of sculpture or the sculptural particularly concerning and presenting new ways in which a sculptural work can be a practical and theoretical methodology for weaving together urbanist, philosophical, political, social and cultural contexts. A work of art situates and visualizes itself in and through a given space by making its territory

88

Chapter 4

appear or disappear; the space operates in the production of sculptural work, and a sculptural object can exercise an active force in reconfiguring and rearranging the existing systems and relations of space. This could also provide a new understanding of the fluidity between spaces – sculptural installation, philosophy and urban space – in the expanded concept of the sculptural, without simply reducing the sculptural to either the urban or philosophy. This section, therefore, focuses on the particular ways in which dwelling space or the space of everyday life is produced, moved and transformed in the process of urbanization. Here, dwelling spaces are not merely considered as physical spaces, such as buildings or blocks of dwellings. Rather, they are all different types of public and private, socio-cultural and political territory, in which complex human interactions take place and relations are formed. When dwelling space conflicts with rapid urbanization or urban redevelopment, it undergoes a complex political process of becoming fragmented, destabilized and fluid, blurring its established boundaries. The marvellousness of visual and material sense of space is constantly presented through the competitive development of urban space in the logic of capital. The (re)production of a particular space includes not only the physical construction and destruction of buildings, but also the formation and change of knowledge and consciousness. A produced space, which constitutes the external form of a city, potentially possesses and exercises a violent force by dictating, homogenizing and hierarchizing the conceptual and material flows of a period in and through the process of urban development beyond aesthetic beauty and economic and scientific pragmatism. In the competitive process of urbanization, this particular cycle of expansion, occupation and (re)development of space does not come from a desire as a form of demand; it is categorically related to the dynamics of urbanism, operating to reorganize visualized spaces or constructed territories and generating and reoccupying a new space through the constant process of transformation and expansion, imposed by the conflict between and coalition of heterogeneous elements and forces. From this perspective, spaces, especially produced in urbanization, change the idea of dwelling as defined by some idealist concepts, such as rootedness, preservation, protection, rest or the act of remaining at peace. Instead, the expanded concept of dwelling and space, specifically, the complex dynamism of (urban) space under the logic of capital is emphasized. The discussion will not be limited to either the disruptive nature of space in the process of urbanization or the Derridean post-structuralist context of deconstructive characteristics of urban space. The urban is not a soul, a spirit, a philosophical entity.6 Urban space gathers crowds, products in the markets, acts and symbols. It concentrates all these, and accumulates them. To say “urban space” is to say centre and centrality . . . for we are speaking here of a dialectical centrality.7



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

89

In Right to the City, the city is understood as (a) a (spatial) object, (b) mediation (between near and distant order), (c) a work (similar to the work of art, formed by a group). Form unifies these three aspects of the city. The “right to the city” becomes the right to centrality, the right to not be excluded from urban form, if only with respect to the decisions and actions of power.8 The city is transformed not only because of relatively continuous “global processes” . . . but also in relation to profound transformations in the mode of production, in the relations between “town and country,” in the relations of class and property . . . Destructurations and restructurations are followed in time and space, always translated on the ground, inscribed in the practico-material, written in the urban text, but coming from elsewhere: from history and becoming.9

According to Henri Lefebvre, who coined the phrase “production of space,” space – an important practical and theoretical term – is conceived not as a physical or conceptual entity, geographical area, block of building or system: rather, it is the locus of producing a way of being, thinking and acting. Urban space, for Lefebvre, is seen as a “pure form,” which has no pre-given or specific content.10 It exists as a concrete abstraction that is no longer separated in either metaphysics or materiality, but is associated with social actions, relations, practices and activities. The urban is considered a set of (political and strategic) operations that can (re)arrange conceptual and material things produced by both nature and society. It functions as a force of (social) centralization or a point of convergence, through which different relations and movements encounter, gather and accumulate by forming a new spatial arrangement and pattern of social action. Specifically, an important point in Lefebvre’s work on the urban, which is a main concern of my study, is his dialectical logic of urbanism. Urban space is dialectically centralized: it gathers things on the one hand, and it refers to something else on the other hand or, in Lefebvre’s words, the “rupture of centre” or “policentralization.”11 In The Production of Space, published in an English translation in 1991, Lefebvre claims that contemporary urban space is produced in and through the complex relationship between the logic of capitalism and the production of abstract space. In the realm of abstract space, capitalism has created spatial homogenization, hierarchization and social fragmentation, which can be understood as essential aspects of urban centralization. For example, the expansion and development of global capitalization has engendered homogeneities rather than heterogeneities or differences. In other words, cultural, historical and social differences tend to be suppressed by a particular movement and invasion of capital in the continuous process of globalization. The reproduction of the social relations of production in this suppressed space, however, necessarily provides and is, therefore, operated by two contradictory yet interactive tendencies of (spatial) movement: the

90

Chapter 4

deconstruction or transcendence of old relations, on the one hand, and the production of new relations, on the other. Hence, in spite of its violently suppressed and homogeneous tendency, abstract space potentially possesses a new space within itself. Lefebvre calls this new space “differential space.”12 Whereas an abstract space tends to move towards homogeneity and hierarchization by weakening or even erasing differences under the certain reign of spatial rule, a new (differential) space is produced and actualized only through the process of connecting and expanding these potential differences and heterogeneities – which are immanent in abstract space – in the new spatial relations and laws. In other words, a differential space can be formed through the process of conflicting with and being emancipated from the repressive forces of homogenization of abstract space. Lefebvre argues that, in the contemporary urbanization, a space becomes both a cause and result of the production of a new space, which is formed in the dialectical conflict between abstract space and differential space. Drawing on Lefebvre’s idea, the urban is considered a decisive force of constructing, destructing, concentrating, distributing and organizing things and ideas. Rather than a passive outcome of material development, therefore, urban space can be a contested zone, in and through which new modes of production, sociopolitical actions and relations are competitively generated to seize a dominant position in exercising a decisive force. The waves of urban space are inseparable from the logic of capital, as space has a tendency to capture or be captured by the logic of capital. In The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, David Harvey defines “capital” as “not a thing but a process in which money is perceptually sent in search of more money.”13 Here, the process can be understood as a circulation process, which is an essential element and methodology for the actualization and survival of capital. There are, however, correlated positive and negative aspects of capital flow in relation to growth and crisis in the global socio-economic context. For instance, one negative aspect of capital circulation is that volatile capital movement results in economic instability, specifically, the lack of capital flow from rich to poor countries, which is accompanied by the problem of concentration and distribution of wealth, including class struggles and financial crises throughout the world. This negative point can, by contrast, be transformed into an opportunity to renew pre-established economic and political structures. A positive aspect is the increase in economic growth and technological progress, which can stimulate expansion of the labour market and an improvement in quality of life and working conditions. However, the overaccumulation of capital produces a limitation in absorbing surpluses of both capital and labour, resulting in capital devaluation as well as the decrease of productivity in the market. From this perspective, capital plays an active role in consistently searching for and moving towards a new space, where both



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

91

growth and profit are expected. It is no longer identified with a certain kind of system, such as capitalism; rather, it is a conceptual and material epicentre of moving and changing a pre-established organization and space. Capital flow presupposes tight temporal and spatial coordinations in the midst of increasing separation and fragmentation. It is impossible to imagine such a material process without the production of some kind of urbanization as a “rational landscape” within which the accumulation of capital can proceed. Capital accumulation and the production of urbanization go hand in hand.14

The interrelation between urban space and capital has been the subject of much consideration; particularly, focusing on how capital operates and spatializes itself in and through urban space and on how urban space is transformed and produced in relation to the logic of capital. Harvey’s theory of uneven geographical development provides significant points, in that it has sought to investigate the relation between economic growth and the restructuring of urban geography. He does not simply provide socio-economic descriptions of uneven geographical development, but considers the significant role and meaning of uneven development of urban space in the reproduction of capitalism. As Harvey states, “It is through urbanization that the surpluses are mobilized, produced, absorbed, and appropriated and . . . it is through urban decay and social degradation that surpluses are devalued and destroyed.”15 In addition to the circulation of capital, as described, the production of urban space is definitely related to capital accumulation. The production of urban space under capitalism necessarily accompanies the (re)construction of built environments and transportation and communication systems to facilitate capital accumulation and flow. Harvey claims that (the production of) a space inevitably relates to capitalist dynamics. More specifically, the dominance of the spaces produced by capitalism is not only temporary, but also unstable, which means that existing built environments and the systems and relations of production become less productive, owing to rapid changes in capital accumulation, technological innovation and competition between rival producers.16 As a result, capital accumulation necessarily moves from one place to another to search for a new (profitable) space, according to changing cycles of spatial economic restructuring. In Harvey’s theory of geographical difference, the dynamics of urban space, therefore, produce a particular pattern of spatial differentiation, which is one of the essential conditions for mobilizing and sustaining not only the mode of production, but also the geography of sociopolitical relation and power in human society. In contrast with the conventional idea of the annihilation of space in terms of the dominance of cyber space, spatial differentiation in the contemporary global circumstance emphasizes “relative locational advantages,” whereby spatially differentiated quality

92

Chapter 4

in the mode of production, capital mobility and power of labour provides continuous implementation of new technologies and organizational forms, in order to maximize the efficiency and value of capital by absorbing further capital (re)investment of surplus value and purchasing power.17 Spatial differentiation, therefore, potentially exists everywhere and is actualized in the course of the devaluation or crisis of existing values, systems, modes and relations of production. In the process of urbanization, a space is necessarily differentiated to overcome barriers and crises, resulting from the competition of market, and to transfer a devalued space to a profitable terrain for its survival. Urbanization as a spatial differentiation can be understood in terms of the politics of reproduction, through which new spatial dynamics of territorially organized power is competitively provided and applied to reconfigure existing modes of production and systems and relations of space. The particular aspects of spatial differentiation are created in and through the movement of – in other words, the coalition of and confliction between – spatial relations, strategies and forces in the process of urbanization and its relation to the creation of territorial forms of organization, including capital accumulation and flow, social zoning, the right of land use, spatial (re)occupation and displacement of people or power in and from a particular area of space. Urbanization can be described as having particular economic and geopolitical patterns of spatial differentiation, in which both a space and the relation of that space are formed and operated according to three interwoven tendencies towards: (1) destructive (the concept of productive violence), (2) expansionary (the action of power) and (3) territorial (capital accumulation and the logic of unevenness) movements. On the basis of these three aspects of spatial differentiation as formative vectors of urbanization, urban space is considered both the cause and result of change and the problem, as the space itself is not merely a passive outcome, resulting from human activity, but an essential operative element of the formation of everyday life, which acts directly or indirectly to shape not only the material scene of space, but also the human behaviour and thought of the period. This produces and transforms the dynamics of urbanism in the process of spatial differentiation, operating in the tension between contradictory elements of the space, for example, centrality and disorder, or condensation and displacement. This tension is not limited to the economic dimension, but is involved in the construction and destruction of conceptual and material reality. In the complex, and even conflicting, process of urban development, new spatial movements, strategies and relations can be continuously provided and actualized through the space to overcome the crisis or limitation of pre-established systems and relations of space.18 First, the destructive aspect of spatial differentiation is essential for the production of urbanization, especially its operation in the relationship between capital accumulation and the formation of the built environment.



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

93

The built environment of the city – for example, Seoul or New York – is formed, necessarily occupying some places within a certain geographical boundary. In urban space, capital accumulation on the land concentrates on a limited place and, therefore, the value of a space – such as rent price or the desirability of a place – is necessarily increased each year for its survival. This results not only in the need to invent new strategies for increasing surplus value through the space, but also in the peripheralization of the urban poor and spatial shortage in and from the space.19 Urban land development, therefore, aims to maximize the capacity of spatial limitation by constantly reconfiguring and reconstructing social relations, production systems, technologies and institutional organizations within a geographically limited area. The destructive nature of urban space is certainly related to the competitive development of innovative technologies between rival producers. “Such waves of innovation can become destructive and ruinous even for capital itself, in part because yesterday’s technologies and organisational forms have to be discarded before they have been amortized . . . and because perpetual reorganizations in labour processes are disruptive to continuity of flow and destabilising for social relations.”20 In stiff capitalist competition, achieved values and the level of technology tend to be easily devalued and degenerated, owing to the continuous emergence of new relations, methodologies and ideas. If existing systems and relations of production are expected to be ineffective for the future expansion and movement of capital and the production of surplus value, they cannot avoid their replacements or crises, because the geographical boundary of the space itself cannot be changed or replaced with another. The transience of urban space, specifically, the repetitive process of generation and degeneration of the built environment, relates to Harvey’s account of “creative destruction,” in which he emphasizes “the significance of crises as moments of urban restructuring.”21 Second, capital is understood as a dynamic and expansionary force. For its survival, it needs to secure a dominant position over the occupied territory to gain more profits. Under the condition of contemporary globalization or the global market economy system, the construction of large networks and liquidity of capital and the discovery and the development of new markets are significant in this sense. According to Harvey, the expansion of urban space or the production of a new space is achieved through the tension between its “contradictory tendency towards differentiation and equalization.”22 He relates this to the politics of difference, which he considers significant in examining “how differences understood as power relations are produced through social action but also how they acquire the particular significance they do in certain places and situations.”23 Harvey utilizes the notion of difference in relation to economic and geographical changes and movements resulting from the logic of capital; for instance, the uneven distribution of

94

Chapter 4

wealth and unequal development of urban space in the system of capitalism. Difference or differentiation is the precondition of establishing equalization in terms of the politics of space. These are different but inseparable processes of spatial expansion. Differentiation is the act of placing or relocating things or ideas in a different order and relation. The concept of equalization does not signify the equal ability of producers or the traditional notion of indifference, but the equal redistribution of critical force by returning to the space of everyday reality or the given space. Equalization is certainly a conflicting but negotiable process of spatialization, which can reshape existent forms, organizations and relations of space. More precisely, equalization is conflicting, as its activity and formation are always to be found in an endless encounter with heterogeneous elements in a given space. However, equalization becomes negotiable, in the sense that it opens up for discussion the acts of participating, of locating different elements in the same line and of producing a new network or connection. The politics of differentiation and equalization are thus considered necessary in the expansion of urban space. Third, the production of urbanization creates a particular type of the territorial movement of spatial differentiation. Here, territorial movement or power is not merely identified with spatial construction or operation as a physical container, but as a political zone, in and through which an encounter between different elements, forces and movements can occur and a new form of connection can be produced. It cannot also be reduced to capital itself. Rather, territorial power plays an important role in the conceptual and material process of stratification and hierarchization of urban space via geographical and uneven concentrations, acting and reacting to the movement of capital. Harvey pointed out the importance of the contradictory relationship between territorial power and capitalist power in urban development. He describes “territorial power” as “the political, diplomatic and military strategies invoked and used by a territorially defined entity such as a state.”24 In contrast with this, capitalist power functions as that in which “economic power flows across and through continuous space, towards or away from territorial entities.”25 Urban development under the logic of capital is, therefore, inextricably held in a struggle between territorial power and capitalist power. This is because capitalist logic tends to transcend and exceed any established systems and relations, because of its expansionary movement and endless innovation of methodologies through and beyond the crises that it always encounters; whereas territorial logic focuses on the construction of a certain regime of space, which can manage movements of capital and relationships of production in relation to real space and provide a certain type of space or spatial organization. Urbanization can be understood in terms of the dialectical movement of different powers – such as territorial and capital powers – which reproduces and destroys a given space.



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

95

2.  URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING IN PARIS The previous section described the process of urbanization, in particular, emphasizing economic and geopolitical patterns of spatial differentiation, in which both a space and the relation of that space are formed and operate according to the logic of capital. This section aims to develop the concept of urbanization and to investigate the transformation of urban space or urbanism; this is essential in understanding the regime of the sculptural and its relation with space, particularly concerning how the urban functions as a spatial factor in the production of the sculptural and how a sculptural object can be urbanized. The main objective of this section is to provide a shifting idea of the concept of space, specifically by looking at the ways in which a particular form of power structure functions in the process and outcome of urbanization, including the construction of a particular form of spatial pattern or urban hierarchy and the mechanism of (social) change. Urban space cannot be reduced to a static physical entity, such as a block of buildings, bridges and roads, in and through which people and things are occupied and can pass safely. Rather, urban space as the dynamics of production and deconstruction constantly evolves and changes, not only by building a particular form of conceptual and material organization of the space, but also by inventing a new method of systemizing that organization. The change of urban space certainly involves the reconfiguration of existing social relations and orders, of the system of knowledge and of classification and the condition of everyday life. In this respect, I focus on the mechanism of the transformation of urban space, particularly from planned urbanism to produced urbanism, in order to extend the current understanding of the space, and to investigate how urbanization in the cities has developed and the relationship between territory and political system has changed. Planned urbanism, or what I call centrally planned urbanism, can be understood as politically based urban production – which has emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the early period of capitalist industrialization in Western countries – whose process is decided and managed by the state, performed by private developers and financed with loans backed by the state. Mostly, this planned urbanism is produced by a political and social demand of the state – rather than a market force – which is utilized to solve various social and economic problems of society, such as unemployment, poverty, hygiene, centralization, housing shortage and the deterioration of old housing, simply by transforming a city. From a materialist perspective, the expanded role of the state’s power in a particular area of space is an essential factor that characterizes a particular feature of urbanism, because politics and the production of space are inseparable. In planned urbanism, the state becomes involved in large parts of the process of development, not only in planning a new idea,

96

Chapter 4

but also in establishing an outcome in and through the installation of its own political autonomy and self-definition. Planned urbanism is operated by the linear structure of power, which connects the state’s policy with its material organization and with its exercise of power in the logic of exclusion and homogenization. In the exclusive law of planned urbanism, the state functions massively and predominantly by repression. This view of the state differs from Marx’s explanation of the contradictory position of the state, in which the state is considered as a sphere of social life not only separate from, but also opposed to society. For Marx, this contradiction between the state and society is seen as a condition of the formation of society. In For Marx, first published in 1965, Louis Althusser describes the “despotic government”: “The State can no longer be the ‘reality of the Idea’ . . . it is systematically thought as an instrument of coercion in the service of the ruling, exploiting class.”26 By contrast, the state – which is central in planned urbanism – is not simply opposed to society, but society is represented and materialized by the state. The important point that I focus on here is, therefore, the relationship between territory, or territorialization, and the structure of power. In planned urbanization, a space is not produced in an unplanned way, organically, without intention or volition, as a natural region might be. Rather, planned urbanization is regarded as the construction of urban hierarchy through the conscious decision of the state. This planned development of space has a tendency towards a total transformation, a complete revolution and a deconstruction of the past, usually in line with a certain direction of political and ideological rationalism. In many cases, the development of the space conforms to a geometric and symmetrical plan that represents a conscious decision to impose order on the landscape. By building in the form of a grid, a space is divided into different zones, such as public facilities, private residential areas and parks and monuments. The term “planned” here is used as synonymous with “controlling.” Planned urbanization, therefore, refers to neither a market nor a natural region, but to a spatial entity, which acts as a mode of legal control and zoning, creating social and political coherence through the emergence of the urban system. In the process of urbanization, the state acts as a political institution, which functions to balance and maintain class rule. The state has a strong relationship with the dominant classes, in order to obtain financial support for its plans from the ruling classes. This urbanization – which is organized by the state and the ruling class – does not function democratically for all the people, since the dominant maintains power by exploiting the dominated. Through the reorganization of space, consciousness is urbanized. A better image of the society is distributed to the people, in order to make the dominant’s system of organization legitimate, so that it becomes natural. If this legitimation becomes successful, the dominant classes can maintain their authority to stabilize, and therefore solidify the



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

97

established system. However, a class struggle between the majority in the lower class and the minority in the ruling class is inherent in the process of urbanization. At every moment, discontent can be formed, ruptured and expressed by the excluded or the ruled, because urban space – which is composed of different forces and relations – is definitely not an absolutely uniform spatial entity. In other words, if the plan does not function equally for all the people and therefore creates a certain disadvantage, such as an unequal distribution of wealth and power, formed by exploiting profits from the lower classes, the disadvantaged group regards the plan as a failure and opposes the ruling class, asking for equality. The ruling class exercises repressive power through the police, the courts, the law or the army, in order to defend its profits and power. Planned urbanism emerged with the explosive urban growth in the early twentieth century, along with changes in social and economic conditions, such as rural and urban migration, centralization, industrialization, mechanization and massive reordering of built environments in the process of reconstructing a city. As an example of planned urbanism, I would like to describe Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris under the reign of Louis Napoléon III, which continued until the end of the nineteenth century. Haussmann was commissioned and greatly supported by Napoléon, who wanted to stabilize and strengthen his political position through the redevelopment of Paris, by demonstrating his leadership to the people.27 Haussmann’s plans could be put into actions by virtue of Napoléon’s dictatorial powers, his governmental supports and extensive finance from the ruling class of the Parisian bourgeoisie. The structure and functional system of the city were transformed through the construction of new roads, buildings, public parks and an extended sewerage system. The project was a massive reconstruction of the entire city, which included the total transformation, not only of the centre of Paris for the middle and upper-middle classes, but also of the surrounding areas for the lower classes. Haussmann gave the city a geometric grid and a symmetrical form, dividing medieval Paris into new districts.28 The medieval streets were seen as a barrier to the reconstruction of the city; their narrowness and windingness acted as essential factors in allowing communes and radicals to occupy them, creating battlegrounds for uprisings against the French government. The reconstruction of Paris, such as the widening of streets, aimed to achieve political stability, economic development and social hierarchy. In the course of industrial transformation, the social purpose of the reconstruction of the old street system was to increase circulation and the speed of transport within the city. This created a socialization of space, especially for the middle and upper-middle classes. The reorganization of streets produced a unity of body, which provided a continuity between commercial and residential

98

Chapter 4

sectors and between governmental and public facilities by allowing efficient movement. Haussmann transformed spaces on both sides of wide and opened streets into offices, shops and luxury apartments, so that people could more easily gather and meet in the central area of the city. Most importantly, from a political perspective, in order to protect and stabilize the government’s established power, the simplification of old winding streets into a straight, wide and geometrical network aimed to establish an efficient system of power through anti-riot streets, whereby riots could be suppressed by blockading refuges for radicals and communes behind barricades. The widening of streets proceeded only through the massive destruction of many buildings. From an economic perspective, this large-scale reconstruction project was planned to solve the problem of unemployment by providing public works, to increase the rate of economic development in post-war France. However, this redevelopment area became a site of rupture and conflict, in and through which opposition to Haussmann’s total, standardized, transformation of Paris emerged. According to Roger Price, “Haussmann’s authoritarian behavior, questionable financial methods, and doubtful accounting became the target for criticism by jealous ministers and officials of the Conseil d’Etat and Cour des Comptes, all anxious to control his initiatives.”29 A social problem, which accompanied the financial problem, was Haussmann’s maintenance of the established class hierarchy, which did not aim to profit the low classes, who would be peripheralized to the outskirts of the city. The widening of the streets by demolition – which was originally planned as an anti-riot measurement of the government – became a trigger for the people to barricade and demonstrate against the state. This particular case of Parisian urban transformation in the 1800s demonstrates that planned urbanism has a certain tendency to standardize a space by decreasing the possibility of developing different spatial patterns, because its scale of development is, in most cases, beyond the reconstruction of a single old house. As Harvey insists, “Modernism in the inter-war years may have been ‘heroic’ but it was also fraught with disaster. Action was plainly needed to rebuild the war-torn economies of Europe as well as to solve all the problems of the political discontents associated with capitalist forms of burgeoning urban–industrial growth.”30 Planned urban development recreates a large area of space, or even a whole city; this involves reconstructing not only buildings and (social) zones, but also infrastructures of the city, as well as reconfiguring existing facilities, such as transportation, communication, power, water and sewerage systems, which enable the city to function. Technological innovation in the process of industrialization is necessarily applied to, and supports, this reconfiguration of the functional systems of the city; for example, the widening of medieval streets in Paris enabled an increase in speed and circulation of transport and products.



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

99

In this particular case of Paris, I focus on particular aspects of planned urbanization, to investigate the shift of understanding of urbanism or urban space, particularly moving from the logic of planning to the logic of production. First, a newly planned space is constructed according to the logic of economic efficiency – which can also be related to the idea of Fordism in the mid-twentieth century – in which housing is mass-produced and organized for the multiplicity of people or the community, particularly for the working class and the urban poor. This principle of mass production of housing can also be found in some twentieth-century plans for Paris transformation, for example, Le Corbusier’s proposal for a city for three million inhabitants in Paris in 1922, called “La Ville Contemporaine (Contemporary City)” but never fully realized, owing to opposition.31 Another example of planned urban development is the Grand Ensemble in Sarcelles, which was led by modernist architects Roger Boileau and Jacque-Henri Labourdette in 1954. Brian Newsome describes the expansion of mass housing: “By 1968, the complex covered more than 420 acres and contained 51,674 people and by 1969, one in six residents of metro Paris lived in a grand ensemble like Sarcelles.”32 Mass production and consumption of housing are seen as not only a marked feature, but also an industrialized method of spatial organization and systemization of planned urbanism that unifies space in a certain pattern in terms of repetition and uniformity. Second, planned urbanization is based on the principle of destruction, which necessarily removes previously constructed buildings from a target area. Practically, this urbanization transforms the space by increasing the density of buildings, changing the functional system and enlarging the means of circulation. This redevelopment-based destruction creates a complex spatial transformation particularly in the process of industrialization. According to Lefebvre, industrialization – which is inseparably yet conflictually linked with urbanization – produces a particular feature of modernity. In Western Europe, urbanization has a dialectical relationship with industrialization. Industrialization is, for Lefebvre, not identified with urbanization, but it is seen as an external force that attacks and produces urban space or urbanism. In Writings on Cities, first published in English in 1996, Lefebvre describes three periods of modern urbanism: Industry and the process of industrialization assault and ravage pre-existing urban reality, destroying it through practice and ideology, to the point of extirpating it from reality and consciousness. . . . Urbanization spreads and urban society becomes general. . . . One finds or reinvents urban reality, but not without suffering from its destruction in practice or in thinking. One attempts to restitute centrality. . . . To the old centralities, to the decomposition of centres, it substitutes the centre of decision-making.33

100

Chapter 4

The predominantly destructive role of urbanization – which is managed by the state and the ruling classes – acts as the machine of modernity that reinstalls a new form of spatial order in and through a given space. This machine is certainly different from an organic and natural object, which develops without human intervention. On the basis of Lefebvre’s analysis, the machinic process of urbanization is possible through the dialectical synthesis of spatial organization: destruction, distribution and reinvention. In other words, planned urban development – which is dominated by knowledge and science – represents and operates a new form of coherence through a process of destruction. Destruction here does not mean that the urban centre disappears, since there is no city without a centre. Rather, it is the reconstruction of the structure and the system of the centre. Nietzsche’s concept of the “will to nothingness” is useful in understanding the meaning and function of destruction in planned urbanization; this means that a weak, dominated point – in Nietzsche’s terms a “reactive force” – becomes a growth pole that can negate the active force of the constructed and turn against itself. The plan – which is managed by the state – provides an opportunity to separate dominant systems and relations or “active forces” in the space. Nietzsche understands this opportunity as the opposition of a continuum, which performs in association with reactive forces.34 In contrast with the traditional concept of the state’s role – acting as an active force that possesses and protects its territory by stabilizing inequalities between different forces – in planned urbanization, the state, rather, makes the active force of a given space reactive, in order to destroy and change the existing system and relation of the centre. From Nietzsche’s perspective, the city can be seen as a space that is intermingled with different yet interactive types of force, such as active and reactive forces. Urbanization is, therefore, a multiple phenomenon, rather than a single uniform event. Once dominant social groups, such as the state and the bourgeoisie, grasp an opportunity, they exercise their power by appropriating, possessing, subjugating, dominating urban space and by the mode of production. Deleuze explains, “To appropriate means to impose forms, to create forms by exploiting circumstances.”35 According to the law of appropriation, the dominant force generates the power of transformation by entering into a relationship with the space. Newly planned coherence is distributed through urban practices by returning to the chaotic urban reality, for example, the geometric transformation of medieval streets in Haussmann’s redevelopment of Paris. In the process, the negation or reactive force of the state is transformed into a power of affirmation through the actualization of urban practices. It is the logic of domination and oppression that activates the power of affirmation over culture and personality. Through this power of affirmation, the space tends towards equalization and an annulment of difference. This affirmative force of urban planning provides a certain form of continuity between



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

101

differences, and systemizes space in the logic of coherence by installing a new operational structure of the centre. The operation of a new structure at the centre constructs a new urban hierarchy through conflicts between the new order and the existing order. A number of magnificent houses disappear, others are converted to include workshops and shops, tenements, stores, depots, warehouses, firms replace parks and gardens. Bourgeois ugliness, the greed for gain visible and legible in the streets takes the place of a somewhat cold beauty and aristocratic luxury. On the walls of the Marais can be read class struggle and the hatred between classes, a victorious meanness. . . . The “progressive” bourgeoisie, taking charge of economic growth, endowed with ideological instruments suited to rational growth, moves towards democracy and replaces oppression by exploitation, this class as such no longer creates – it replaces the oeuvre, by the product.36

Third, a reduction in construction cost is inevitable, since profits are more easily obtained by building shops, offices, factories or housing for the upper classes, than by the construction of housing for the lower classes. Therefore, in many cases, housing projects for the lower classes are undertaken by the government as a part of its public and social housing policy to solve housing problems in the city, rather than by the investment of a commercial company. This public housing construction as a part of welfare policy for the lower classes does not aim to achieve surplus capital and attract investment through the distribution of the space in the market. Therefore, the project does not focus on the significance of historical and aesthetic value and quality, but maximizes functional aspects and economic efficiency. Owing to the unprofitability of such housing projects, the government tends to reduce its expenditure on housing construction, using cheap materials, and, especially, standardizing, simplifying and systemizing the space, without regard to any detail or quality. This planned space is neither constant in the very long run, nor independent of the city that organizes its space, because it will be constantly devalued in the coercive law of market competition. Fourth, a planned city performs as a regulator of modern society, which functionally divides its space, based on engineering, scientific and industrial references. The industrialized imperative of housing has a tendency towards the idealistic yet repressive reproduction of space on the premise of equal living conditions for everybody. Planned urbanization distributes not the equal opportunity of decision-making for an individual’s own space or an equal right to the city, but the equal condition of decided spaces, in which a particular group of people or community is forced to live. Planned urbanization is organized and appointed by strong governments, which create legislative and municipal acts to control construction and urban planning, for example,

102

Chapter 4

by displacing the poor from the centre of the city in order to make the cleared space economically and politically more profitable. In the mid-twentieth century, in Paris, the shift of social composition can be found in the transformation of space from low-income housing units to upperincome housing, offices, shops or other new buildings. Nan Ellin pointed out that from 1950 to 1975, over 340,000 new housing units have been supplied to central Paris, accompanied with mono-functional zoning.37 Along with this spatial transformation of central Paris, a large amount of public housing for the lower classes has been built in the suburbs, as part of a gentrification plan for Paris. The ruling classes intervene actively in the process of urbanization, occupying a prime position for capital, space and the means of production and controlling the process of production and distribution. For Lefebvre, the city – which has been attacked by industrialization – has dramatically influenced not only people’s thoughts and behaviour, but also the entire social and political structure and system. Specifically, the collective monumental housing of this particular modern period in Paris acts as a closed object, not as a space, in which the flow can be made from the autonomy of the inside, by separating itself from the past and the site and simplifying the specificity of the old space. In the field of architecture and urban design, I take postmodernism broadly to signify a break with the modernist idea that planning and development should focus on large-scale, metropolitan-wide, technologically rational and efficient urban plans, backed by absolutely no-frills architecture (the austere “functionalist” surfaces of “international style” modernism). Postmodernism cultivates, instead, a conception of the urban fabric as necessarily fragmented, a “palimpsest” of past forms superimposed upon each other, and a “collage” of current users, many of which may be ephemeral. Since the metropolis is impossible to command except in bits and pieces, urban design (and note that postmodernists design rather plan) simply aims to be sensitive to vernacular traditions, local histories, particular wants, needs, and fancies, thus generating specialized, even highly customized architectural forms that may range from intimate, personalized spaces, through traditional monumentality, to the gaiety of spectacle.38

In Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier emphasizes the concept of plan: “We must study the plan, the key of this evolution.”39 For Le Corbusier, the plan refers to the “fixing of a new basis of construction established in logic.”40 The logic – which becomes a ground for new construction – relates to the architectural principles of modernism, which utilizes architecture as an economic and political tool that can resolve problems caused by changing economic and scientific conditions, through urban planning. Specifically, the plan is, for Le Corbusier, against the city, rather than for the city, since the logic of exclusion operates as a decisive force that separates the plan from the



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

103

past and the site by erasing the specificity of the existing space. Le Corbusier understands the architecture’s opposition against the past as a revolution. The discontinuity between the plan and the site is created by the autonomous principle of interiority of the plan, not by the space, which moves from within to without. The exterior is seen as the result of an interior.41 The plan is a “pre-determined rhythm,” which performs in the same unity of law.42 The aim of planning is to place and internalize a new order in the space by forming a rhythm or equilibrium of society that proceeds from equalization, compensation and modulation.43 However, in the condition of globalization, a new concept of urbanism has emerged, which is more complex and does not simply negate modernist ideas and practices, such as the principle of exclusion, based on purity, unity, collectiveness and order. In The History of Postmodern Architecture, published in 1998, Heinrich Klotz argues: The final goal is to liberate architecture from the muteness of “pure forms” and from the clamour of ostentatious constructions in order that a building might again become an occasion for a creative effort, attuned not only to facts and utilisation programmes but also to poetic ideas and to the handling of subject matter on an epic scale. Then the results will no longer be repositories of function and miracles of construction, but renderings of symbolic contents and pictorial themes – aesthetic fictions which do not remain abstract “pure forms” but which emerge into view as concrete objectivisations to be multisensorially apperceived.44

While Modernism aims to change the city through the reconstruction and destruction of the space according to its logic, which is based on utopian, idealistic, monumental and authoritarian principles, it is obvious that the new form of urbanism tends towards achieving a dynamic unity, an inclusivity or flexibility between different elements, such as urbanism and site, experimenting with historical, social and political contexts. As Robert Venturi argues, “It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.”45 In current tendencies of urbanism, the transition from the logic of plan to the logic of design (or what I call “production”) is recognized. The new form of urbanism or produced urbanism is certainly distinct from the modernist account of standardized planned urban development, which tends to totalize different elements as a single organization in the logic of the collective monument by excluding opposites and differences. In the globalized circumstance, produced urbanism goes through and beyond the boundary between differences and contradictions according to the logic of inclusivity and flexibility, emphasizing symbiotic relationships, relationships between the private and the public, the community and the city, the rural and the urban, the old and the new. Specifically, in contrast with the notion of

104

Chapter 4

planning, production is an important concept in produced urbanism; it participates in the process of creating a new possibility of developing different spatial patterns in the existing space, rather than separating the space from its site. Production and urban space (or urbanism) are in an inseparable yet contradictory relationship. Production here does not mean material production, but is a set of forces that creates a new method of spatial systemization. Production consists of, and is operated by, three prerequisites: the right to production, the object of labour and the mode of production. The role of production is to develop a new continuity between these three. In addition, production cannot be realized without its relation with capital and space. Urban space not only actualizes production, but also produces a different spatial pattern by re-mapping existing systems and relations of space. Considering the right to production, the changing role of the state is, therefore, inevitable – having an expanded yet permeable border – as power moves from the state to the global market, rather than remaining within its own territory. This certainly changes the structure of power, as it enters into a complex relationship between the territorial state and deterritorialized and transnational cultural and economic movements. This particular tendency of globalization is obviously related to a neoliberal turn that has become dominant in political and economic ideas and practices, particularly in the 1970s. In his book titled A Brief History of Neoliberalism, published in 2005, Harvey defines “neoliberalism” as a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.46

Neoliberalism has a tendency to shift the traditional role of the state, instead of simplifying either the increase or reduction of power. In contrast with the centralized political system in planned urbanism, the principle of market and the logic of competition are two essential factors to which the new form of urbanism is subordinated. As Harvey argues, the neoliberal state necessarily protects individual freedoms, individual property rights and freely functioning markets and trade.47 Produced urbanism is, therefore, no longer practised and controlled by the power of a single centralized body in order to disseminate a better image of the city and, therefore, control its territory. Rather, since the 1990s, the expansion of neoliberalism has changed the structure of power through the strengthening of the interrelationship between the state and local governments in the process of urban restructuring, because the new form of the state and governance becomes more active and



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

105

interventionist than that of the 1970s and 1980s, and acts as a neutral arbiter between rival groups and individuals in society. This changed form of governance plays an important role in the process of urbanization, particularly in the market-oriented globalized economic environment. By distributing centralized and unified state power to diverse local governments, local governments or authorities also have a right not only to select private agents and development companies, but also to manage them to (re)construct the city in the logic of competition. These subdivided, yet interrelated, political forces are not separate from each other, but meet, in order to mobilize a space in the logic of privatization, liberalization and deregulation. In this respect, an important aspect of the development of different spatial patterns in produced urbanization is linked to the privatization of investment and the production of new space. The object of labour is also significant for determining the form of urban production. In the shift of social and economic conditions, the relationship between urban development and the object of labour has changed, moving from massive urban production as a (short-term) solution to the problem of unemployment in the labour market to flexible urban production, in which the participation of people is not reduced merely to that of a victim, which is necessarily changed through the plan. Whereas the object of labour in planned urbanism is limited to unemployed people, particularly the lower classes, produced urbanism is achieved through the assembly of different groups of people, who actively and spontaneously engage in the process of producing the plan. Ellin describes the particular tendencies of current urban planning: To anti-autocratic; anti-authoritarian; small-scale plans, or, if the intervention is large, collage-like using a number of architects and a design guide; participation of users or at least an effort to accommodate people rather than change them; a favoring of political decentralization and non-interference from the central State authority, liberal political economy, neo-conservatisms.48

Rather than the standardization of space by a single body of authoritarian power, this new form of urban planning operates in the logic of inclusivity, preventing the monumentalization of space. The active participation of diverse groups of people, such as architects, urban designers, engineers, artists, theorists and users, and of different forces in the process of urban production, changes not only the object of labour, but also the system of production, from a vertical to a horizontal system. Planned urbanism creates a new point of convergence, rather than a fixed, centralized convergence. The centralized political role held by Paris has always been significant in urban development and planning. However, in the twentieth century, the urban development of Paris has been gradually changed, particularly its

106

Chapter 4

transformation of the mode of production and development of space. While Georges Haussmann had reconstructed Paris as a powerful centre in the nineteenth century, two major trends in the transformation of urban development in Paris were recognized in the twentieth century: polycentralization and inner-city gentrification. In the 1960s, Paris experienced its great transformation. In the process of deindustrialization, manufacturing was displaced from the centre to the periphery of Paris. Between 1958 and 1962, under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, Paul Delouvrier was nominated délégué général for the district of the Paris region.49 By making up for certain problems and limitations observed in the case of new town development some 60–80 kilometres away from London, under the New Towns Act 1946 and led by the British government, Delouvrier carried out urban decentralization in Paris in order to prepare for post-industrial changes in a future Paris. Delouvrier’s urban development project was called “centres restructuratuers,” which means suburban growth poles.50 This urban project focused on expanding the central zone of Paris, by developing existing industrial areas as growth poles, within 30 kilometres of the core city.51 The project also included the expansion of the transportation system from the core centre to the subcentres. Accordingly, by 1982, the population in the central zone of Paris had decreased by about a third; in contrast, the population of suburban areas had increased to almost twice that of the central city.52 In the period of post-industrialization, the central zone of Paris had been changed to a commercial and office zone, and this was followed by a large social and physical transformation of the urban environment. Between the 1960s and 1970s, the amount of office space increased in Paris by almost five million square feet per year.53 High-rise office towers, such as Tour First (1974), Tour MaineMontparnasse (1973), Tour Areva (1974) and many others, were mostly constructed during the 1970s in the core city of Paris. This is certainly related to the deindustrialization impact in Paris, which influenced the decline in the number of blue-collar workers and the increase in the number of white-collar workers, who work in the service sectors. Paris is in the process of urban transformation. In 2014, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, announced a new urban project, “Reinventing Paris,” which calls on internationally wellknown architects to propose innovative projects for the transformation of the urban sites. This project aims at the modernization of Paris, particularly the redevelopment of twenty-three selected sites and the construction of more office buildings, hotels and amenities, with the aim of rendering the targeted areas more attractive. Consider this particular case of Paris urban transformation since the 1960s. It is clear that urban development or the (re)production of space cannot be separated from a change in the mode of production, because the mode of production is an important factor, which changes and determines not only



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

107

productive forces, but also the relations of production that make production function and cause the plan to be systemized in a certain way. This mode of production cannot be reduced to material production; rather, it is a broader concept, which includes the concept of reproduction, consisting of the act of circulation, distribution and consumption. In the contemporary condition of globalization, specifically in the course of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, the mode of production has been changed, in particular from the state mode of production to the flexible mode of production.54 Stuart Elden sees the state mode of production as focusing on three important elements, initially described by Lefebvre: (1) managerial and administrative, (2) the power to protect and (3) the power to kill.55 The state mode of production is based on the logic of monopoly, in which the state as a political unit intervenes in the economy to protect large-scale monopolistic planning from the action of private agents, by fixing a legal framework within which large developers can have a priority to operate effectively. It is centralized particularly on manufacturing. By contrast, in the disposition of globalization, the globalized system of production is not always matched by a globalized consumption pattern. This is because different income levels and types of consumption are constantly fragmentized and polarized into a particular condition of production. Therefore, rather than a monolithic production system, led by the limited dominant, the new mode of production tends to be flexible and globalized in many sectors by making products cheaper and circulating them more easily and efficiently for consumers all over the world. Whereas the state mode of production has a tendency towards the production side of the operation, which is led by the limited dominant groups of people in society and aims at redistribution, based on the system of social classes, the flexible mode of production focuses on the diversity of consumers, which varies depending on their income levels and the sites that they relate to. Based on different consumption patterns throughout the world, the production process and its method are strictly subordinate to the social, cultural, economic and geographical conditions of the site. In this interpretation, the contemporary process of urbanization, therefore, operates in the logic of flexibility, which seeks to reconfigure existing labour relations and production systems in relation to different social, economic and geographical contexts. The fragmented condition of consumer markets and the expansionary nature of capital flow are considered two key factors in the shift of urban production. The force of flexibility stimulates the decentralization and differentiation of production systems, as capital constantly seeks to enhance its value and profitability by externalizing and distributing itself through specified production lines. A new form of specialized urbanization can emerge, resulting from the expansionary nature of flexible production systems and the fragmentation of consumption. In the process of urban development, public

108

Chapter 4

and private sectors work in partnership, as the flexible system of production enhances the interdependence of different forces, relations and sites. The process and direction of urbanization can be affected and even determined by the relationship between space and capital. Urban development or the (re)development of space is considered as the reproduction of fixed capital, which not only reconstructs physical frameworks, such as housing, offices and factories, but also reconfigures the existing system of spatial, social and power relations and movements. Urban development is essential for the accumulation of capital, because it becomes a ground, not only for the circulation of capital, but also for the process of production and distribution during a given period of time. The production of new spaces or different spatial patterns is, therefore, subordinated to the flow of capital, which constantly seeks profitable spaces in order to absorb surplus capital. In other words, if an existing space fails to absorb surplus capital, this means that the space is degenerated in the market. In this account, urban development in the logic of produced urbanism has progressed in an uneven pattern of geographic development, whereby the development and investment of space is limited to a particular area of space, which is considered as a profitable space in terms of the logic of capital, rather than part of an equal development of all the spaces. Degenerate spaces usually have a long period of time to increase in value and catch up with their rival producers by restructuring their production systems and relations. The increase of the value of a space can be proved only through its survival in the space of market. Gentrification is an important method of increasing spatial value, and particularly applies to the urban poor, as they sell their places to the rich. Through the process of redevelopment, housing prices usually increase. In many cases, low-income families, who cannot afford to buy the new housing, become peripheralized to the outskirts of the city. The exploitation of space – especially that possessed by the urban poor – is a necessary process of the expansion and survival of capital. The deconstruction and reconstruction of degenerated space forms a repeating cycle, because the physical boundary of a city, such as Manhattan in New York, is limited and the battle for the occupation of an advantageous position in the market is inevitable in the constant competition between rival producers and the innovation of technology. Capital accumulation produces a space through the reinvestment of the surpluses generated. When the accumulation of capital in the existing system of production stops slowly, new spaces must be found for the profitable production of capital and the absorption of surpluses. In this rapidly shifting and destructive circumstance, flexibility as a transferable force produces a new continuity between disconnected and fragmented elements by enabling the transformation from a degenerated space to a profitable space and forging a new relationship between a new force and a different existing spatial system.



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

109

According to Harvey, “Flexible accumulation . . . is marked by a direct confrontation with the rigidities of Fordism. It rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption. It is characterized by . . . greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological and organizational innovation.”56 In the process of produced urbanization, flexible accumulation creates a particular system of space, which includes a more flexible geographic mobility of capital, flexible patterns of consumption and flexible labour processes, in order to overcome massive devaluations of fixed capital investments and physical infrastructure in the market’s competition. Flexible accumulation can be achieved through improved systems of organizational form, new urban structures and new technologies in production. Urbanization based on the system of flexible accumulation aims to construct surplus value continuously through the space, relying on accelerating the turnover time of capital, accentuating the speed of circulation through the market system.57 The production of the city and the housing market has been seen as a main engine of the capital accumulation of urban capitalist economies. The transformation or reproduction of fixed capital has frequently been considered an important economic solution or stabilizer, which can reproduce a differential and therefore profitable space and absorb surplus capital. However, by looking at the subprime crash and resulting crisis that began in the United States in 2008 – in which the unstable relationship between fixed capital and financial capital caused a severe economic crisis throughout the world – fixed capital can no longer be reduced merely to a stable means of the production of surplus capital, since it constantly changes, relying on shifting social, economic and political conditions. Although the free market is based on the minimalization of state power, the intervention of the state in controlling housing prices and interest rates is certainly inevitable in order to prevent the market from monopolization and speculation, which deeply increases social and economic polarization and inequality. In the tension between the territorial force of the state and the capitalist force of the market, the condition of the market – which includes capital flow, consumption patterns and the system of production – can be changed. In the process of changing, an existing space or urban structure is necessarily transformed into a new one at a given point in time, not simply because the space relates to those different forces, but also because the value of the fixed capital is affected by changes in the condition of the market. Through this process, a new space can emerge. Looking at the case of Paris urban transformation, the expansion of the concept of space and urbanism is significant, particularly concerning the shift in perception from the traditional concept of sculpture to the sculptural, not only because it allows us to expand our understanding of the world, environment, society and space, where we live in and through, but also because an

110

Chapter 4

artist acts and reacts to the world, by entering and intervening in the space. This definitely relates to the transformation from the installation of the object in space to the spatial installation of the object. It does not aim to focus on describing particular sculptural works that convey sociopolitical subjects and issues arising from or conflicting to the process of urbanization or urban space through the artwork’s participatory or performative action in a public realm in a literal sense. Nor does it aim to devalue the notion of the object by identifying the sculptural simply with the form of the spatial, the social or the urban. Rather, it attempts to discover and elaborate a new meaning and form of the sculptural, which bridges between urbanism and the traditional concept of sculpture from a different view, and to develop the spatial and functional significance and role of sculptural object as a new aesthetic methodology to re-conceptualize the meaning and process of sculptural production and perception (see figure 4.1). Differentiating from that of urbanization under capitalism, the sculptural mode of production does not aim to capture or to be captured by the logic of capital. A work of art, of course, cannot be disconnected from an art market, managed by the movement and accumulation of capital; however, the intention or aim of the production of a work of art does not simply lie in the reproduction and circulation of capital in the socio-economic context, whose terms also need to be expanded from a different perspective. An important aspect – which bridges urban space under capitalism and the concept of the sculptural in this study – is that both capital and the sculptural can be reconceptualized as an operational force or essential dynamic systemization, which necessarily participates and produces itself by developing and applying a new mode of production in and through the space. According to Lefebvre, the concept of production subsumes not only economic production, but also

Urbanism

The sculptural

Sculpture

Figure 4.1  Situating the Sculptural. Source: © Euyoung Hong.



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

111

the reproduction of social relations of production, which facilitates a certain form of the space of everyday life. Sculptural production is, however, different from Lefebvre’s account of the social production of space. It is because – even though a sculptural work is necessarily produced and actualizes itself in and through the relationship between the sculptural and real space or the urban – a sculptural work tends to seek for and produce an actual or potential chance to construct or deconstruct the reality of space by moving through and beyond the established systems or structures in that reality. From this perspective, which can be distinguished from geographical differentiation, resulting from the flow and accumulation of capital,58 the sculptural is seen as an essential operational dynamism, which is fundamental yet radical, necessary for stimulating the generation of the conceptual and material production and transformation of space. The sculptural exactly resides and is actualized in the moment at which the boundary of a pre-given territory of a space is blurred and expanded by continuously returning or responding to that space differently. A sculptural work is, therefore, not merely a description of our current surroundings or urban space; but it is a new possibility of urbanism, which provides not only a new mode of the production of space, but also a new pattern of territorialization. 3.  SEOUL: URBAN TRANSFORMATION SINCE THE 1970s An example from the past decade, on which I focus, is South Korean urban (re)development, particularly in the central area of Seoul. This can be read in one way as a specific regional case of capitalist urbanization, but it could also be considered another way, as a part of contemporary globalizing condition, as both are inseparable. In the urbanization of Seoul since the 1970s, the development of urban space has emerged on a large scale, necessarily accompanying different sociopolitical powers, which often aim to achieve their own interests through development projects. Many problems have occurred in the process of such development. A recent example is the Yongsan international business district development project.59 In this radical circumstance of development, the definition of dwelling space is changed to indicate a kind of speculative item, or an investment for making more profits in a relatively short period of time, instead of a space for protection, peace and permanent residence. In this process, conflicts between a developer such as the state or a large construction company and local people cannot be avoided. The development procedure is extremely violent, aggressive and exclusive (see figure 4.2). In many cases, people have to leave their homes, whether or not they can afford to buy or rent a new dwelling space. Once old houses in slum areas have been replaced

112

Chapter 4

to create a new district, housing prices soar to unaffordable levels. This newly transformed dwelling space, therefore, is planned and produced not for the urban poor, because those people certainly cannot afford to buy the new houses. Mostly, low-income families are peripheralized and displaced to the low-priced areas in the outskirts of Seoul’s metropolitan area. This conflictual process of urban development produces an urban order that controls and hierarchizes not only the pattern of movement and the form of relationship and organization, but also a way of life. As a part of urban hierarchization, people who do not possess their own land might easily become potential or real urban terrorists, and can threaten and transgress the established order. Here, the occupation of space cannot be equated merely with the possession or ownership of a particular physical place. The separation of occupation from ownership has been a dominant tendency in the current scene of uneven geographical development of urban space. In South Korea, for example, despite the government’s emphasis on housing purchase and four decades of extensive housing construction and supply, there has been a clear tendency to decrease the amount of owner-occupied housing and to increase the proportion of non-owner-occupied housing; this is certainly

Figure 4.2  Removal Area in Seoul, 2012. Photograph taken by the author. Source: © Euyoung Hong.



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

113

related to the stability of house prices. If house prices do not increase, the rate of housing purchase rapidly decreases, as profit from the property is scarcely to be expected. According to the population and housing census of 2010, owner-occupied housing in South Korea is 54.2 percent, which is 1.4 percent less than that in 2005.60 Workplaces, such as offices, factories, schools, galleries and shopping malls, are, in most cases, non-owner-occupied spaces. In this respect, the concept of occupation needs to shift from the possession of land to the use of land. In addition to the decrease in land ownership, a significant aspect of most redevelopment projects in Korea, which affects and results from social hierarchization, is that tenants – who not only use and work in rented space, but also, if we think of the total amount of non-owner-occupied space in South Korea, comprise over 46.8 percent of the Korean population – have been completely excluded from both the process and the results of redevelopment projects, as they do not own a property in the area. Urban redevelopment for improving housing conditions causes geographical inequality, as the majority of tenants have to move into another place worse than their previous housing. Another problem is that only small numbers, less than 10 percent, of local residents have been able to afford to return to the same area after redevelopment.61 Tenants usually suffer from a serious violation of their housing rights during the redevelopment process. The aim of redevelopment projects should be not only the improvement of housing conditions, but also the protection of tenants’ rights. The government necessarily provides information and guarantees participation of the tenants regardless of their ownership of the housing. However, these demands are ignored by both the government and the construction companies, who gain most profits from the redevelopment projects. Currently, there are many redevelopment projects in Seoul, but the number of empty houses is also increasing, owing to the unevenness of housing supply and demand. In addition to this unevenness, the decrease in housing value also causes significant socio-economic problems, such as increases in household debt and factors affecting the collapse of the middle class. Another aspect that accelerates the fragmentation of urban space is that, in the process of (re)development, land owners within the redevelopment area are, in many cases, persuaded to form their own redevelopment cooperatives, so that they can have a right to choose a construction company to carry out the whole process of redevelopment, from the compensation of households to vacating the land of all tenants. This privatized development decreases government involvement and encourages profit-making by construction companies. This can be seen as a new form of the colonization of urban space. In this particular circumstance in South Korea, tenants are frequently regarded as urban terrorists against the government, who can possibly threaten the stability of coherence of the space at any time.

114

Chapter 4

These particular aspects of urbanization, as previously described, are not limited to private sectors; they can be found in cultural sectors – such as commercial galleries, national and private museums and non-profit organizations – because those institutions also occupy a common shared space with other forms of urban practice. In Seoul, over the past decades, rent prices have soared; national economic recession has continued in the negative effect of the global finance risk. For these reasons, many small galleries have closed and disappeared, because they could not afford to pay their rents through the sale of artworks. Accordingly, in Seoul, many art districts, such as Insa-dong, have already been transformed to business districts, as the galleries have become replaced with major restaurants, offices, shops and cafes. This particular tendency of the transformation of the cultural sector definitely affects the unequal structure of the art system. In other words, to ensure their survival in the changing urban condition, existing galleries tend to plan their exhibitions and businesses, relying on artworks that already have a market value in the art world, or focusing on the development of business ideas that transform art into a commercialized cultural product or a speculative display in the built environment, through which they can make more profit in a shorter time. What I would like to find through this particular example of urban transformation is, of course, not merely a description of how an economic pattern affects or even controls urbanization, including art systems. Sculptors often utilize pre-manufactured objects in constructing their sculptural works. Moreover, many, but not all, artworks are transformed into commodities; they enter and circulate in the capitalist system. In considering these particular interrelationships, I focus on what makes a work of art different from commercial goods and how this difference creates the new and therefore expands both by feeding them back to each other. To understand this, it is important to recognize particular ways in which a sculptural work relates to the capitalist system of production and circulation; to examine commercial goods, which are produced by the system, and their relation to the formation of a particular pattern of urban geography, rather than simply unifying both as a single unitary entity or separating the one from the other. In traditional Marxist theory, the circulation of commodities is considered the result of the movement of money, which acts as an important means of circulation.62 With the very earliest development of the circulation of commodities, there is also developed the necessity, and the passionate desire, to hold fast the product of the first metamorphosis. This product is the transformed shape of the commodity, or its gold-chrysalis. Commodities are thus sold not for the purpose of buying others, but in order to replace their commodity-form by their moneyform. From being the mere means of effecting the circulation of commodities, this change of form becomes the end and aim. The changed form of the



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

115

commodity is thus prevented from functioning as its unconditionally alienable form, or as its merely transient money-form.63

In this view, the realization or metamorphosis of commodities can be achieved by transforming an ideal value-based price of commodities into an actual quantity of money through, in Marx’s terms, the exchange process of C–M–C.64 The circulation process of commercial goods or commodities is unstable and changeable, because the process is dominated by various changing factors, such as wages, labour maintenance, technological innovation, the price of land use and market conditions, which not only influence and change the system of production, but also operate the means of commodity circulation, which is money. In the geographical circulation of commodities, as Harvey indicates, the circulation process can be actualized in and through a capitalist market economy, which is associated with a particular spatio-temporal fix.65 Capitalist urbanization is, therefore, considered an essential factor in actualizing the process of circulation, as the circulation of capital is based on the organization and movement through space of production, money, commodities, exchange and labour. This spatial circulation process tends to be in a state of tension, instability and conflict between different forces and movements. This is because the production of profit or surplus value becomes not only a driving force for systemizing the network of production, circulation, exchange and consumption processes, but also a violent force that accelerates the instability of space through the continuous process of revolution and change. Specifically, the instability of the circulation process is the outcome of inevitable problems of over-accumulation, which is easily devalorized and, in many cases, even physically destroyed in the course of crisis. A continuous restructuring of the mode of capital production and circulation becomes a precondition for survival in the competition with rival producers, which necessarily accompanies technological, socio-environmental and structural innovations. The circulation of artworks is, however, distinct from the Marxist account of the metamorphosis of commodities, which is the interchange between money and commodities, because it is certainly not the monetary value or profit-making that can be equated with or objectify the value of a work of art and enables a work of art to be visualized and expressive and to survive in and through the world. A sculptural work’s relationship with the logic of capitalism, rather, focuses on discovering and developing a new possibility for understanding ways in which objects are produced and valued and, therefore, structure everyday life in the system of economic exchange; a sculptural work interacts and experiments with these objects and their particular systems in a new principle of spatial order and relations. In the regime of the sculptural,

116

Chapter 4

the concept of circulation is understood as the political strategy of spatial transformation, in which an object is displaced from its original place and relocated to a new zone, where the activity of deterritorializing and reclassifying an existing value system occurs. This sculptural system of circulation is, certainly, different from that of goods or commodities. In The Social Life of Things, published in 1986, Arjun Appadurai explains that the value of goods or commodities is not considered an “inherent property of objects, but is a judgment made about them by subjects.”66 An object in the economic system can achieve its own value through the sacrifice of other objects.67 In contrast, the sculptural system does not operate according to the logic of sacrifice, which necessarily exhausts an old value in order to replace it with a new one. In the regime of the sculptural, the object is, rather, considered a thing with social and political potentiality, which already has its own territory. A sculptural work penetrates and expands this potentiality of the object through the invention and distribution of a new mode of circulation. In his new mode of sculptural circulation, an object acquires not only a transformative value, which acts as a driving force in systemizing the production and circulation of artworks, but also a new axis, which is able to reorganize existing systems of order and relations of space, according to its own spatial principles. In this respect, it can be said that a sculptural work does require the idea of capitalism, not because the work represents or is absorbed within the capitalist process of production and circulation, but because the capitalist system provides a particular conceptual and material ground for constructing a work of art, which can be exchanged into another form. Capitalism becomes a work of art itself; a work of art acts as a critical development of capitalism, by expanding the capitalist exchange value. This is certainly related to the particular dimension of the sculptural, which can be actualized and expressive through its contradictory relationship with urban space under capitalism. It can, therefore, be a sculptural work’s internal contradiction and its political potentiality that I would like to find through the relationship between the sculptural and the urban. From an art historical perspective, the paradoxical nature of sculptural work can be found in minimalism, which includes not only the system of minimalist sculpture, but also its relationship with the environment of the 1960s and 1970s. In The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Hal Foster underpins the contradictory value of minimalist sculpture. In the context of Morris’s dialectical idea on the genesis of minimalism – “the autonomous and literal nature of sculpture demands that it have its own, equally literal space”68 – Foster points out minimalist sculpture’s tension, particularly between the demand for autonomy (the Greenbergian context of modernist sculpture) and the demand for literalism (the Friedian context of minimalism).69 This tension is formed through two forms of



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

117

structural mechanism: on the one hand, the paradigm of minimalist sculpture is based on the principle of reduction, which “captures pure forms, maps logical structures, or depicts abstract thought”70; on the other hand, it attempts to overcome the traditional vertical relationship between subject and object by proposing the notion of situation, in which the viewer’s bodily experience in literal space or the externality becomes necessary in the formation of a work of art.71 Foster’s view on this particular aspect of minimalist contradiction is drawn from its relationship with abstract expressionism, particularly its model of the artist as existential creator and as formal critic to the relationship with modern aesthetics in the historical context.72 Minimalism appears as a historical crux in which the formalist autonomy of art is at once achieved and broken up, in which the ideal of pure art becomes the reality of one more specific object among others. This last point leads to the other side of the minimalist rupture, for if minimalism breaks with latemodernist art, by the same token it prepares for the postmodernist art to come.73

The term “modern aesthetic” here refers to the traditional model of consciousness, which is undoubtedly based on the idealist rationalism of composition. The idealist rationalism is certainly reliant on the Kantian system of knowledge, which can be realized through the access of the subject’s a priori intuition, not of the property of the object. This knowledge system formulates a particular internalized order, which does not mean that the existence of a work of art is mind-dependent. Rather, it is a pure form of space and time that is independent of the world and acts as a structural framework that operates in the extension from the internal to the external. In this idealist system of internality, or the a priori process of knowing, a sculptural work may be expressed, experienced and judged as a particular form, which is converted from one state to another state, for example, from an ordinary object to a (human) figure or from the ideal to the real. This process is also relevant to the modernist metaphorical line of thinking, which separates a work of art from its site or its relationship with the externality and systemizes it according to its pre-existent and totalized internal order of organization.74 Minimalist sculpture challenges this internal logic of sculpture, by working serially, as Judd puts it, “one thing after another.”75 In contrast with the modernist relational order, Foster focuses on serial production in minimalism, which is seen as a new consistency in structuring a sculptural work, by moving into a logic of externality through an insistence on the viewer’s bodily experience and the site of the sculpture, which had once been refused by traditional modern sculpture. This particular spatial method of minimalist sculpture suggests what Fried calls objecthood, the condition of non-art, which emphasizes the presence of the object in the constant relationships of position between the

118

Chapter 4

viewer and the sculpture’s installation space in the logic of literalism, instead of on the internalized idealism of modern sculpture. Ironically, seriality can also be understood in terms of the industrial and social order of late-modern society, which was once refused by minimalist sculpture. Serial order is a machine that deconstructs modernist anthropomorphic and metaphorical composition through the process of de-subjectification (or the fragmentation of subject), de-humanization and mechanization. Minimalist sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s makes an antithetical relationship with the order of post-industrial culture, which can be characterized as technologization, commodification and mass production. In “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” published in 1990, Krauss analyses the dialectical relationship between minimalism and the late capitalist production in terms of Fredric Jameson’s concept of “cultural revolution,” which is described thus: The imaginary space projected by the artist will not only emerge from the formal conditions of the contradictions of a given moment of capital, but will prepare its subject – its readers or viewers – to occupy a future real world which the work of art has already brought them to imagine, a world restructured not through the present but through the next moment in the history of capital.76

Here, the significance of the imaginary space, produced by the artist, is its function of the de-programming of existing spatial networks. This spatial de-programming operates on the principle of contradiction, the principle by which, as Jameson explains, the postmodern society exists in conflictual relationship between various modes of production, rather than being controlled by a dominant single unitary mode. The imaginary space can, therefore, be considered a transitional and political zone, in which one dominant power supersedes another and, therefore, the space is in a process of change. This transition does not simply imply a linear movement from one mode of production to another. Rather, the relationship between distinct modes and its association with given social forms is significantly considered, particularly its participation in the new diachronic systematic restructuration.77 In considering the case of an urban project, the Unité d’Habitation, in Marseille, which was developed by Le Corbusier with the collaboration of painter-architect Nadir Afonso and completed in 1952, Krauss emphasizes the shifting idea of the space of capital, particularly its transformation from isolation within the realm of industry to a purer form, which spreads throughout and penetrates all sectors of social life.78 For Krauss, the construction of a site is considered the production of a “utopian alternative,” which is achieved not only through the violent transformation of old urban networks, but also through its new structure of fragmentation, by moving into heterogeneous



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

119

cultural patterns.79 Heterogeneity can be considered a new method of non-hierarchical ordering, which is the opposite of modernist rationality. Minimalism cannot, therefore, be seen as discontinuous from capitalist production, not only because minimalist sculpture has utilized methods of nonhierarchical ordering, such as seriality, but also because the expansion of capital includes the sector of art; a work of art becomes transformed into a destructive form of movement that breaks from the old system of production and accelerates its restructuring of the existing system through a transition to a new mode of production. In this respect, it is important to re-illuminate and further expand the significance of the cultural and historical development of minimalist sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s to understand the contemporary condition of sculptural production, which has been influenced by and responded to a particular aspect of capitalist urbanization, that is to say, its development through the logic of contradiction. From a sociopolitical perspective, the concept of contradiction has been recognized as an essential method of studying and constructing the logic of capital. In Das Kapital, Marx pointed out internal contradictions in the system of capitalist production, whose law is “imposed by incessant revolutions in the methods of production themselves, the resulting depreciation of existing capital, the general competitive struggle and the necessity of improving the product and expanding the scale of production, for the sake of self-preservation and on penalty of failure.”80 Marx’s internal contradiction is operated according to the condition of three interrelated factors in the principle of market: the production and realization of surplus value, the extension of market and the improvement of modes of production.81 In this particular market condition, contradiction accelerates not only capital accumulation – which enables existing boundaries and limitations to encounter in the process of geographical differentiation – but also the circulation of capital, because it is the nature of capital that constantly discovers a new space, through which it can overcome those limits so as to gain more profits. In this respect, contradiction can be thought of as a dynamic impetus to operate, mobilize and sustain a certain mode of production. In The Limits to Capital, first published in 1982, Harvey further develops this Marxist account of capitalist contradiction in terms of the concept of unevenness. Harvey’s argument is articulated on the premise that “capitalism does not develop upon a flat surface endowed with ubiquitous raw materials and homogeneous labour supply with equal transport facility in all directions.”82 Harvey describes this particular nature of capitalist space as a “richly variegated geographical environment.”83 This complex geographical environment is certainly brought about through the radical process of spatial reconfiguration, which is, as Harvey argued, reliant on dialectical opposition,

120

Chapter 4

for example, between concentration and dispersal. Concentration can be achieved within a certain geographical boundary, in which a conversion from temporal to spatial restraints can arise to create a dynamic of accumulation.84 This is because the process of accumulation is formed by the production of surplus value of capital, which can maximize its profits from the compression of time and space. In the process, large quantities of capital become embedded in a restricted area in space. The quantities of capital produce a particular form of intensity in the space, which can be considered the process of geographical differentiation or localization. Deleuze defines “intensity” as a form of difference, which is “the sufficient reason of all phenomena, the condition of that which appears.”85 Intensity is “the Unequal in itself.”86 In the realm of urban planning and architecture, this dynamics of concentration formulates particular urban patterns, as Harvey claims, through uneven geographical development, which cannot be separated from the accumulation and distribution of capital. In the development of urban space, for example, in the case of South Korea, the state and major planning agencies intervene in the process of urban development, exercising some dominating power over localities. A targeted place is transformed from a degenerate space to a political zone, in which different powers encounter each other and become condensed in a limited zone of place through the privatization or monopoly of the right to develop and the planned inflow and outflow of the population and capital. In this particular condition of production, capital accumulation qualifies a space as, in Deleuze’s terms, a sedentary space – which means that a space becomes organized and differentiated within a restricted space through a particular consistency of spatial networks, such as production relations, technology and information systems or transportation – according to the dominant logic of space and mode of production and to the logic of market competition. By contrast, dispersal is considered the principle of the divisible, which becomes possible and is accelerated only by extending the organized system of space; this includes a continuity between the technology of production, the structure of distribution and physical and social infrastructures. The process of distribution is expansionary and destructive, as, in some cases, existing boundaries and limits have to be broken down or transgressed, which were once produced in the process of accumulation. Dispersal can, therefore, be achieved through the power of extensity, which forms and even determines the quality of intensity, by cancelling or reducing differences.87 Whereas the intensity of capital concentration overcomes time through the restriction of space, the extensity of dispersal overcomes space through the reduction of time. The reduction of time, or, as Deleuze puts it, the “time of equalisation,” is an essential factor in the logic of distribution or nomadic distribution, through which things are arranged in the order of time, not of space, and the inequality of intensity is transformed into a form of the divisible.88



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

121

In the process, a space is changed “from more to less differentiated, from a productive to a reduced difference, and ultimately to a cancelled difference.”89 Dispersal is not the negation of concentration, but the expansion of the concentrated, moving through the space between differences. “Difference is negativity, . . . it extends or must extend to the point of contradiction once it is taken to the limit.”90 In the case of Seoul urbanization, for example, dispersal is understood as a distribution of power. Economic interests play a significant role in the distribution of power, which can govern decision-making in accordance with sociopolitical powers. Power is employed and distributed by dominant groups of power holders, such as the state, the local authority, a major construction company or a development agent, who have a right to determine a new place and distribute a mode of production to transform a space from the underdeveloped to the developed or from the territorialized to the re-territorialized, increasing the capability of the space to absorb excess capital. In the process of extension, a new mode of production is distributed by filling the intervals between different or extreme points, and the previously constructed intensity of the space has to be changed into and reorganized as a new form of intensity through the equalization of the divisible. In the context of art, the logic of concentration and dispersal presents an important functional aspect of contradiction, which enables the artist to structure a sculptural practice, by providing a particular form of tension between a sculptural work and its environment. By further expanding the idea of the internal contradiction of minimalism, as described previously, I focus on developing the political relationship between contemporary sculptural practice and its environment, particularly through the dialectical logic of contradiction. To do this, it is important to consider the contradictory system of sculptural practice to investigate ways in which a sculptural practice, as a force of externality, both becomes resistant to capitalist urbanization and at the same time functions as a new possibility of urbanism. I have adopted a position between the sculptural and the city in order to explore the patterning of intersection across this pair of two-way relationships. In the regime of the sculptural, urban space, which is occupied by a sculptural practice, acts as a point of rupture, whereby different forces and powers meet and are translated into a certain form, interacting with conflictual movements between the vulnerable side of the minority, which allows the invasion and crossing of different forces, and the military side of the majority, which has a tendency to control and protect the territory. Therefore, the destructive aspect of urban space, as described previously, becomes the perfect staging point for this radical sculptural shift. A sculptural practice in the expanded concept of the sculptural is particularly resistant to the capitalist system of collection and consumerism, which are considered fundamental factors in functioning and sustaining art

122

Chapter 4

institutions, such as commercial galleries, museums and art markets. A sculptural practice produces and actualizes itself through its experiment with the concept of ephemerality, by negating destructive aspects of the ephemerality of capitalist production and systems, for example, the fast turnover of construction and destruction (of the mode of production and the built environment) according to the shifting condition of capital flow. Specifically, rather than being collected and ordered by the logic of capital, a sculptural work collects and reorganizes the system of capital in the principle of double contradiction. In the case of Michael Asher’s Sculpture (1977, 1987, 1997 and 2007), a work of art collects moments and changes of the city, particularly its disappearance in the process of urbanization. The ephemerality of urban space in Asher’s work is certainly related to the shifting idea of the concept of space, particularly the transformation of the concept of dwelling from Heideggerian absolute idealism to a dynamic system of politics, which encompasses the idea of transit or dispersal. The occupation of space, by both a sculptural work and ordinary things, cannot be permanent, as the space itself is constantly generated and degenerated in the process of change. A sculptural work marks the constant change of the city – particularly its degeneration in the capitalist logic of production – in and through the presentation of the object, a caravan, which is also a discontinued model in the vehicle market. Instead of demarcating a certain place, the work appears by erasing itself along with the disappearance of the city. A sculptural work’s internal contradiction emerges through its participation in the abstract space of capitalism. In particular, a space that is operated in the logic of the sculptural denies the capitalist mode of mass production, which is based on the standardization of product and technology, mechanization and mass consumption under the unitary structure of power. The destructive aspect of ordering and hierarchization of space in the case of massive urban development in Seoul can be related to the capitalist production of abstract space, which forces both a space and people to be organized and socialized in a particular spatial pattern, hierarchy and order, socially and politically demarcating a place (see figure 4.3). From a spatial view, after the (re)development, the central space of Seoul has gradually become homogenized and standardized, filled with repetitions of similar types of high-rise buildings and apartments, like a forest. In the process of capital accumulation and (re)distribution, old and degenerated spaces keep disappearing, owing to changing aesthetic values, modes of production and the spaces’ functional role for economic efficiency. In contrast with this homogenization of urban space, the space is, at the same time, separated, fragmented and hierarchized, by creating social zones. Korean houses have been transformed enormously, influenced by modern Western culture since the 1950s. High-rise residential buildings in the



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

123

Figure 4.3  Metropolitan Seoul, 2016. Photograph taken by the author. Source: © Euyoung Hong.

popular parts of Seoul, constructed since early 2000, have become a predominant part of the contemporary Korean scene, especially for the rich. The interior space of these houses places great emphasis on a high quality of living and well-being, including the most innovative technology, luxury building materials from all over the world, exceptional design by internationally well-known artists, high levels of security and safety, protection of privacy, rights of view and maximum control of accessibility from the outside to the inside, rather than representing a certain traditional ideology, social order or belief through the form of architecture, which previously frequently appeared in the Korean house. This particular type of house has a tendency not only to secure the independence of private space between individuals or between different households within a building, but also spatially to widen the gap between the rich and the poor. This residential building stands like a fortified place, which functions offensively and defensively, by protecting the people within the space from the outside. This place is a symbol of authority and power, separating itself from others via the strict control of accessibility and visibility, as well as by its autonomous system of living. This particular urban order can be produced by the capitalist logic of mass production. Indeed, it is the theory of cultural revolution that the imaginary space projected by the artist will not only emerge from the formal conditions of the contradictions of a given moment of capital, but will prepare its subject – its readers or viewers – to occupy a future real world, which the work of art has already

124

Chapter 4

brought them to imagine, a world restructured not through the present but through the next moment in the history of capital.91

Since Duchamp’s ready-mades, unaltered mass-produced industrial materials have often been utilized in structuring and constructing sculptural works, such as Serra’s House of Cards (1969) and Smithson’s Mirror Displacement (1969), although these works are resistant to the idea of capitalist mass production. This particular aspect of sculptural practice is found in the development of conceptual and minimalist sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s, which transformed the meaning of the artist’s production from the craft basis of production to the installation of pre-manufactured objects. In this transformation, installation became a key sculptural method that not only enabled the production of a work of art, but also allowed the sculpture to go through and beyond both the old mode of sculptural production and the capitalist logic of mass production by creating and exercising its own principle of space on the basis of the idea of singularity. This is because the logic of capitalist mass production and that of sculptural singularity have different exchange systems. Mass production, particularly in the Fordism of the early 1900s, can be characterized as the reduction of unproductivity, the removal of individuality and the verticalization of power structure.92 Mass production developed a new manufacturing technology, which is dominated by economic efficiency and high-speed operation in a unitary and standardized production system. Instead of making small quantities of different products, mass production maximizes productivity by producing a huge quantity of the same product in a short time for supply to larger sections of the population. In the process, the value and price of a product are reduced. This machinery production process is operated in the verticalized power structure, in which a production line – in which a product is assembled and sequenced in a number of highly divided sub-production lines – is constructed and controlled by a single logic of a dominant group of decision-makers or producers. Mostly, this production line is temporary, because once a product becomes devalorized and degenerated in the process of market competition, an old production line has to be destroyed and replaced by a new production line in order to produce a new product. However, in the case of mass production, this change of production line or system has not been easy, owing to the system’s structural inflexibility. In the system of mass production, the inclusion of the masses in the process of consumption and the circulation of commodities, for example, the formation of a large consumer society, is not related to economic democratization; rather, it is considered a means of market expansion to accelerate the fluidity and accumulation of capital, so that producers can maintain and strengthen their production regimes. According to Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, technological innovation – such as the “development of



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

125

numerically controlled machine tools which can be programmed to perform many different tasks automatically” and the “spreading use of such machines in highly competitive small firms” – affected the environment of labour and the system of production, resulting in the fall of mass production and a move towards a more flexible principle of production.93 A sculptural work is not mass-produced but often utilizes mass-produced objects or the idea of capitalist mass production for its construction. While a work of art is circulated in the system of commodities, this non-massproductive tendency of a work of art does not reduce prices and values in the same way as mass-produced products for supply to a larger consumer society. This non-mass-productivity can be understood as the sculptural logic of singularity. However, singularity here does not indicate the traditional craft basis of production. Nor is it to be understood as a part of a priori condition of space, such as the traditional concept of site-specificity. Rather, singularity is to be considered as the political strategy of the sculptural, which operates in actualizing the potentiality of difference. In the logic of singularity, a sculptural practice maximizes its productivity by increasing or developing, not its quantity, but its quality in and through flexible forms of organization and production. This increase and distribution of sculptural quality is not achieved by arranging the masses or the viewers within a vertically uniformed system of power, as, in many cases, the perceptual experience of a viewer becomes or even changes a work of art. In the logic of singularity, a sculptural work can develop a built form, proposing ways in which a new physical and conceptual form of space intervenes in and affects existing systems of order, by actualizing and expressing itself in the political process of planning and execution of new spatial orders in the space. As Lefebvre argues, “Inasmuch as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences.”94 Certainly, a sculptural work produces and acts as a critical force that rearranges and refabricates the homogeneity of mass production, not only by penetrating it through the redistribution of its own logic of space, but also by making a space controversial and political.

4.  GENTRIFICATION OF NEW YORK CITY Once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed.95

In London: Aspects of Change, published in 1964, a German-born British sociologist Ruth Glass first coined the term “gentrification,” to describe a

126

Chapter 4

class-oriented transformation of London. Since the 1950s, London has been transformed by the moving of affluent groups of people into certain areas, with relatively lower rent and real estate prices than established middle-class areas, such as Chelsea or Hampstead. Glass views this as the “invasion” of the middle classes, upper and lower, which concentrated particularly in the western area of London in the earlier stage of gentrification. Glass observes that this urban phenomenon, beginning in Islington and Barnsbury, gradually spread to other districts in London. Between the 1960s and 1970s, it spread further, to include the areas of Camden, Notting Hill, Lambeth, Battersea, Clapham, Fulham and several other districts in the southern and northern parts of London.96 Mostly, these areas, which are described as “old working class districts” in her text, were planned and developed by the British government in the post-war period in order to solve the housing shortage by constructing high-density council housing for the poor in the prime areas in London. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, these areas have experienced a massive social, cultural and architectural transformation, which includes “the increase of commerce and related economic activities and the emergence of new occupations.”97 The affluent newcomers formed an upward socio-cultural environment, which accordingly attracted higher-income families by raising the quality and value of properties in the areas through the process of renovation. The social composition of these areas has gradually changed from the poor to affluent young professionals, such as artists, academics and CEOs, who mostly have higher educational, cultural and economic backgrounds. Through the collective action of the particular groups of people, these impoverished areas have transformed into high-priced residential and commercial places in London, which are filled with luxury houses and offices, brand-name shops, boutiques, trendy restaurants, cafes and galleries. The gentrification of central areas of London is completely different from the recent case of the redevelopment of the Docklands in London, which has been strategically planned by the British government, the Greater London Council, local authorities and developers in order to revitalize the degenerated dock area, particularly improving economic and social problems, such as high rates of unemployment, a decline in the local economy and degeneration of the quality of properties. Gentrification of London between the 1950s and 1970s is, rather, seen as a social and cultural phenomenon that was not planned by the government, local authorities or developers, but occurred spontaneously through the collective action of a particular group of affluent people. In relation to the case of London transformation, gentrification is, in general, understood as an urban process of renewing, rebuilding and upgrading deteriorated neighbourhoods and properties, such as houses and stores, by increasing their economic values. However, it cannot simply be considered an architectural reconstruction of old buildings and houses in an impoverished



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

127

area, but is viewed as a class transformation from lower-income families and small businesses to wealthier households and large businesses through the renovation of particular places. In New York City, for example, gentrification started in SoHo, Chelsea and the East Village in the 1960s and 1970s. It spread out to Harlem, Brooklyn and many other areas. Not only is gentrification currently in progress in these particular areas in New York City, but it has also been constantly affecting other large cities, including San Francisco, Washington, Boston and Chicago. Gentrification is a powerful socio-spatial restructuring process of urban transformation, especially for the improvement of inner-city areas. Early New York City gentrification before the 1980s had been limited to certain areas within the city. However, local authorities and private developers have gradually recognized the demand for housing and investment in the inner-city areas, especially for the middle and upper class. In this section, I focus on economic, social and cultural changes produced by gentrification in New York City since the 1970s, particularly concerning problems of economic and spatial polarization, urban displacement and cultural drift. This will help in finding the meaning and function of space in the production of the sculptural, and an interrelationship between them. First, positive aspects of gentrification can be said to improve the quality of housing, contribute to the tax base and revitalize degenerated prime areas of the city through private development. For these reasons, the city has been pursuing a policy of encouraging gentrification. However, social and economic polarization has been inevitable in the process of residential and commercial gentrification. Gentrification has, directly and indirectly, influenced the increasing residential polarization of the city by income, education and race. According to Peter Marcuse, “Manhattan is of course the most gentrifying borough, while the Bronx is the least gentrifying and the most abandoned borough. Between 1970 and 1980, Manhattan increased its number of college-educated residents by 22.9 percent; the figure decreased in the city as a whole by 4.5 percent and in the Bronx by 36.1 percent.”98 Accompanying residential gentrification, certain districts of Manhattan have experienced the shifting of commercial upgrading in the past forty decades. Since the 1970s, brand-name restaurants, cafes, stores and boutiques have emerged in the city and contrasted with and even replaced small, old and traditional shops in the areas. An example is the SoHo district of Manhattan (South of Houston Street), an area in Lower Manhattan in New York, which is bounded by West Broadway, Crosby Street, Houston Street and Canal Street. This area was initially an industrial zone until the early 1960s. In the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution influenced the system of the production of clothes, for example, in the invention of the sewing machine, which contributed to an expansion in the supply and demand for clothing. Certain types of workplace, mostly sweatshops, expanded rapidly, concentrating in big cities

128

Chapter 4

like New York, which later formed the New York garment district. Until the 1960s, SoHo was full of these types of businesses and factories, which, in many cases, illegally employed minors and immigrants with little pay and bad working conditions. In the process of industrial and manufacturing decline, such as clothing and coal, SoHo has degenerated, becoming an area of industrial slums. By the mid-1970s, however, this area had experienced a huge change, transforming into a trendy neighbourhood, composed of art galleries, luxury boutiques and restaurants. The commercial gentrification of urban areas is always accompanied with complex issues of social class, cultural capital and race. A different consumer society definitely brings about change in the commercial landscape in New York City. The majority of small local shops and supermarkets have gradually disappeared, owing to the expansion of large shops, such as Wal-Mart and Starbucks. Luxury boutiques clearly target the rich, producing high-quality customized goods, designed by well-known international artists and designers, rather than mass-produced products, created at low cost from cheap materials. Second, displacement has always been associated with gentrification. In the process of gentrification, residential turnover among the poor is inevitable. The value of properties in gentrifying areas increases dramatically, generally to exceed the average income of the poor. Most of those displaced have to leave their places and find lower-cost housing, moving to the peripheries of New York City, because they cannot afford to rent or purchase a new property in the gentrifying areas. Marcuse provides an analysis of population changes from abandonment and gentrification between the 1970s and the 1980s: “Total annual displacement in New York City during the last decade includes thirty-one thousand and sixty thousand households displaced from abandonment, plus between ten thousand and forty thousand households displaced from gentrification.”99 According to his analysis, “Between 1969 and 1981, Manhattan gained wealthy households and lost poor households; while the Bronx lost both wealthy and poor households, but lost more wealthy than poor.”100 Displacement has continuously occurred and even worsened, particularly during the 1990s. Springer estimates, “There are currently 21,788 market-rate units [outside the control of the rent stabilization rule], which are home to 49,266 low-income residents in East New York and the surrounding communities.”101 Gentrification of this area certainly affects existing lowincome households, which are progressively driven into distant parts of the city through the increasing influx of relatively affluent residents. Despite all problems and issues, incessantly raised in the process of gentrification since the 1960s, New York City strongly pursues a policy of new housing planning through massive government-led gentrification. On 5 May 2014, New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, announced a new ten-year housing plan, which provides the construction of new affordable



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

129

housing in East New York. De Blasio’s plan promotes the development of higher-density housing with taller buildings, which will attract developers and investors back into the inner city. Under the plan, new high-rise buildings should provide at least 25 percent of affordable apartments, called “mandatory inclusionary housing.” In a study of this mandatory inclusionary housing and the East New York rezoning plan, New York City Comptroller Scott Springer states that the East New York area of Brooklyn is considered an exemplary case for significant redevelopment, including de Blasio’s housing plan.102 The mayor announced that the plan aims to provide 200,000 units of new affordable housing to the city over a ten-year period.103 However, the problem here is how to define affordability or affordable housing in relation to the varying level and trend of incomes. If the standard of affordability is determined by an average of the incomes in New York City, it might overlook a regional variation, that is, a large gap in socioeconomic status between rich and poor areas. Income levels and growths of households are substantially different depending on areas. Consequently, low-income households cannot afford to buy the affordable housing in areas, such as the Bronx and Brooklyn, whose average income levels are significantly lower than a citywide standard. Stringer provides an analysis of the relationship between affordability and area median income. “All units will be made affordable to an average of 60 percent of the [area median income] ($46,620 for a three-person household). These units will produce a rent of $1,295. The median income in the study area was $32,815. Based on the income levels . . ., over 55 percent of neighborhood residents earn too little to afford the plan’s affordable units.”104 According to this analysis, it is clear that the majority of low-income residents in impoverished areas cannot rent or own the affordable housing under the plan because of its imbalance between affordability and income levels and growths, which vary depending on areas. Consider relatively poorer neighbourhoods, such as East New York borough of Brooklyn. In Stringer’s study, de Blasio’s plan cannot supply affordable housing units for over 55 percent of residents in East New York City, which means that if the city provides 3,447 units of affordable housing, 1,724 affordable units will not be supplied; the massive displacement of existing low-income residents in the community cannot be avoided.105 Brooklyn is considered one of the least affordable housing areas in New York City. In the plan, the total monthly rent of affordable housing should not exceed a third of a household’s monthly income. However, “A Brooklyn resident earning the median income would have to spend 98 percent of his or her income on payments to own a median-priced home.”106 In this respect, the majority of residents in Brooklyn are not able to afford either the market-rate housing units or even the affordable units.

130

Chapter 4

When we consider the shifting condition of market competition in the system of capitalism, it becomes questionable whether the city can make or keep an exact balance between varying income levels, proportions of income diversity and housing affordability depending on each income level and area. For this reason, it is also unclear whether de Blasio’s housing plan will solve or, as most are concerned, worsen the housing affordability crisis, income inequality and displacement in New York City. De Blasio’s plan promotes gentrification, proposing the improvement of degenerate areas in New York City through the inflow of the upper and middle classes and of local amenities and services. However, in the system of market-oriented economy, a space should compete with other spaces in order to survive in the market. Increasing the value of property is essential for having advantage through holding a dominant position in the market competition. If a space falls behind in the competition, that space needs to be improved and reconstructed in order to catch up with rival spaces. Otherwise, the economic, social and cultural gap between a developed space and a degenerate space will grow out of control. In terms of the nature of capitalist competition, it is unclear how this upgrading of space by the influx of the wealthier people in the plan will contribute to the minimization of the gap or the equalization between those different spaces and people in the demand of market. Third, cultural drift has resulted from the process of gentrification. Gentrification not only displaces low-income people, but also targets certain types of occupational groups, such as artists and (small) cultural producers. This is called cultural displacement. In the case of SoHo, during the 1960s and 1970s, many degenerate properties in SoHo were transformed from industrial spaces to studio residences, particularly occupied by artists, taking advantage of the large spaces with lower rents. In Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, published in 1984, sociologist Sharon Zukin describes the artist’s creation of a loft living style in SoHo. “Loft living . . . retains several distinctive characteristics: open space, a relation between art and industry, a sense of history, and a fascination of the middle-class imagination with the artist’s studio.”107 By the 1970s, SoHo had been transformed into one of the trendiest residential and commercial areas in Manhattan. Ironically, this caused an influx of more affluent residents and renters in the later process of gentrification, accompanied by increasing rents and property values in the area, which eventually pushed out artists, who migrated into East Williamsburg and farther east, where they could find relatively less expensive properties and places with large spaces. SoHo has transformed one of the expensive business and commercial districts in Manhattan: Now that its impeccably preserved cast-iron fire escapes and industrial facades showcase the wares of Chanel, Prada and numerous less exalted brands, the



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

131

area south of Houston Street is a far cry from the hardscrabble manufacturing zone that once earned the derisive nickname Hell’s Hundred Acres. But don’t write off SoHo as a mere urban shopping mall; though many of the art galleries that made SoHo New York’s contemporary-art hot spot in the 1970s and ’80s decamped to Chelsea and the Lower East Side, some excellent art spaces remain. Walk along the cobblestone streets and find great New York restaurants, bars and things to do in this downtown neighborhood.108

The cultural economy of Manhattan has constantly moved from one place to another. Since the 1980s, the clustering of art galleries moved from the Upper East Side to SoHo, and then to Chelsea. Chelsea became an alternative place for galleries because of rising rent prices in SoHo in the late 1990s. In Harvey Molotch and Mark Treskon’s study of the changing cultural landscape in New York City, the interrelationship between rent rates and displacement is emphasized. By 2007, the number of galleries in SoHo had dropped to 104, while Chelsea boasted 303 – as many as SoHo had at its high point. Rents were clearly a factor in this geographical change of art galleries. Following a decline in rents in the late 1980s, prices for gallery space increased in the 1990s. As New York’s economy recovered in the early years of the present century rents in SoHo increased substantially, almost doubling in 2000–2005, and doubling again in 2005–2007.109

Instead of art galleries, in SoHo, more affluent renters, such as luxury boutiques, fancy restaurants and cafes, moved into the area because of rising real estate prices. These brand-name shops transformed the interiors and exteriors of the properties in order to upgrade the property value, so that the buildings would harmonize with the image and value of their high-quality products, mostly designed by internationally well-known designers and artists and specialized for rich customers. This particular phenomenon of inner-city transformation has gradually spread to other districts, including East Harlem and Brooklyn. Many artists and activists have recognized the seriousness of the current tendency of gentrification in New York City. For example, on 17 November 2015, more than one hundred activists and artists throughout the city gathered at the Brooklyn Museum to protest its hosting of the 2015 Brooklyn Real Estate Summit. The speakers and participants at this conference were investors, property owners, developers, financiers and dealmakers active in New York, who met to discuss current cases, markets and trends regarding recent transactions and projects taking place in Brooklyn, as well as opportunities in the Brooklyn real estate market, under such topics as “Brooklyn’s Finest:

132

Chapter 4

The Next Phase in Brooklyn’s Development,” “The Second Wave: How a New Breed of Innovation will Reshape the CRE [commercial real estate] Industry Over the Next 5 Years,” “There Goes the Neighborhood! Value Add Opportunities in an Oversaturated Market,” “Apartments: How to Keep the Party Going After the 7th Inning” and “Live, Work, Shop: Mixed Use Strategies for Retaining Brooklynites.”110 The protesters were affiliated with the Brooklyn Anti-gentrification Network and members of community groups, who are working on gentrification and related social issues. In front of the museum, the artists held banners displaying the message, “Brooklyn is not for sale.” These protesters asked the Brooklyn Museum to stop the event, whose goal was to make Brooklyn attractive to the affluent upper and middle classes, investors and developers. They claimed that cultural institutions should not stand for gentrification, which will not only make the neighbourhood too expensive for low-income residents, such as artists and cultural producers, but also displace artists, who are supported by this cultural institution. This recent protest by artists in Brooklyn indicated how the current tendency of gentrification in New York intervenes not only in the private sector, but also in the cultural sector by using it to make more profit for developers and affluent residents and businesses, by transforming artists as a target group, who should be pushed out not only from their houses and studios, but also from the very culture they have created. The city, cultural institutions and artists form a complex relationship in the logic of capital. In this complex relationship, space is considered one of the most important decisive factors. Public sculpture has frequently been used in the process of urban regeneration. From a spatial perspective, public sculpture contributes to management and beautification of urban space, which aims at improving environmental quality. Monumental public sculptures, which are publically funded in whole or in part and produced by internationally well-known artists, always decorate the facades of expansive buildings in the big cities, functioning as street furniture, architectural constructions or landscaped environments. No one can find really famous public sculptures in the countryside or in slum areas. These art works are seen as major landmarks, which certainly increase the economic value of the place, maximizing its site-specificity. Despite the fact that some public arts have failed and even had to be removed, in an urban context, public art is, in general, considered a positive contributor to urban restructuring and regeneration. The city certainly needs cultural capital in order to improve the quality and value of space. However, in the context of art, it is clear that this cannot be the only reason why a work of art functions, performs, works and exists in and through public sphere. We share the same urban space. In other words, this means that urban space is a contested zone, in which different forces, ideas and elements encounter and conflict in the process of the production of space. Outside the



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

133

museum or gallery system, a work of art in a public space engages numerous non-art organizations, including the government, architects, urban planners and designers, developers and corporations. Consider the case of the gentrification of New York City. A space is produced, transformed and developed in the logic of capital. The profit-driven development of urban space is inevitable for survival in the system of capitalist market competition. In many cases, it necessarily enters a conflict of interests between different forces and groups of people, such as between the city and the artist or between cultural institutions and artists. Space is constantly changing; a work of art creates the new in and through interaction with and participation in the shifting condition of space. NOTES 1. Raymond Ledrut, “Speech and the Silence of the City,” in The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, ed. M. Gottdiener and Alexandros P. Lagopoulos (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 122, quoted in Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (London: MIT Press, 1996), 49. 2. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books Ltd., 2010), 40–42; my emphasis. 3. Marx describes “capital” as “not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 1:839. 4. David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001), 308. 5. David Harvey argues, “Capitalism is necessarily growth oriented, technologically dynamic, and crisis prone. One of the ways it can temporarily and in part surmount crises of overaccumulation of capital [. . .] is through geographical expansion.” David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 295. 6. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 103. 7. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 101; my emphasis. 8. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 194. 9. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 105–107; my emphasis. 10. Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 119–20. 11. Ibid., 118–19. 12. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 50. 13. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, 40; my emphasis. 14. David Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 22; my emphasis.

134

Chapter 4

15. David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 54. 16. David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006), 97. 17. Harvey, The Urban Experience, 155–56. 18. Lefebvre argues, “The so much vaunted neo-liberalism in this case simply means submitting everything to circulation. One thinks of this plan by Le Corbusier which gets rid of the city and replaces it by gigantic houses where everything is given over to circulation. Le Corbusier was a good architect but a catastrophic urbanist, who prevented us from thinking about the city as a place where different groups can meet, where they may be in conflict but also form alliances, and where they participate in a collective oeuvre.” Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 207. 19. According to Deutsche, “Uneven development in the city arises not only in response to such broad economic cycles but also because of corresponding conditions within metropolitan land markets. [. . .] Redevelopment is the consequence of both the uneven development of capital in general and of urban land in particular.” Deutsche, Evictions, 74–75. 20. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, 92–93. 21. Ibid., 176. 22. Neil Smith draws on Harvey’s logic of uneven development to investigate the relationship between the development of capitalist space and a systematic differentiation, by which he considers a dialectic between differentiation and equalization, not only as the inherence in capital, but also as the necessity of the production of space. He states, “Harvey’s general point is that while there is certainly a tendency toward spatial equilibrium (in the sense of equalization), it is continually frustrated by equally powerful forces at the heart of capital [. . .] which tend toward a continual geographical disequilibrium.” Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 177. 23. Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 361. 24. Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 107. 25. Ibid. 26. Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 2005), 110; my emphasis. 27. Ann-Louise Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris 1850–1902 (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1985), xv. 28. Phillippe Panerai, Jean Castex and Jean-Charles Depaule, Urban Forms: The Death and Life of the Urban Block (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2004), 140. 29. Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 226. 30. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origin of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), 31. 31. In his plan for a “contemporary city of 3 million inhabitants of 1922,” Le Corbusier provided a blueprint for large urban planning, which consisted of a complex of high-rise building, acting as an administrative centre for the city. The reorganization of the street system was an essential part of the construction, to facilitate speed and transport. Supporting the modern hygienic movement, Le Corbusier’s plan included green spaces to harmonize labour and leisure. According to Paul Mattick, Le



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

135

Corbusier was interested in building a new form of urbanism based on “the prosperity, joy and social harmony promised by modern technology [which] could be realized only in a society ‘centrally controlled, hierarchically organized, administrated from above.’” Paul Mattick, Art in Its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2003), 80. 32. W. Brian Newsome, French Urban Planning 1940–1968: The Construction and Deconstruction of an Authoritarian System (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009), 109. 33. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 81. 34. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1983), 59–60. 35. Ibid., 39. 36. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 75. 37. Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 45–46. 38. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 66; my emphasis. 39. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (California: BN Publishing, 2008), 64. 40. Ibid., 63. 41. Ibid., 5. 42. Ibid., 49. 43. Ibid., 50. 44. Heinrich Klotz, The History of Postmodern Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 239. 45. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (London: Architectural Press, 1977), 16. 46. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 47. Ibid., 64. 48. Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism, 112. 49. H. V. Savitch, Post-Industrial Cities: Politics and Planning in New York, Paris and London (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 100. 50. Ibid., 102. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 109. 53. Ibid., 122. 54. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 141–72. 55. Stuart Elden, Understanding of Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London: Continuum, 2004), 224. 56. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 147. 57. Ibid., 285. 58. Harvey argues that the production of geographical difference is both a fundamental aim and an essential methodology for the survival of capitalism, as capital constantly moves from one place to another with the pursuit and development of local differences that generate greater profit. Harvey, Spaces of Capital, 312–16.

136

Chapter 4

59. The redevelopment of Yongsan was planned by the Korean government in 2008 to transform the old towns in the Yongsan-gu area in Seoul into a new international business district. However, the Yongsan incident occurred in the radical process of urban (re)development in South Korea on 20 January 2009. Six people, including one policeman, were killed and twenty-three people injured in the process of suppressing the protest, led by the tenants of the target buildings. The tenants, who constructed and occupied a watch tower on the top of the building, protested against the government’s Yongsan redevelopment project, because they did not believe that the compensation from the government was fair to them at all, compared with that paid to the owners of the buildings. The tenants, most of whom had run businesses in the area over long periods, in some cases for decades, were forced to give up their only means of living. The government paid them only for living costs for a few months, moving costs and minimum compensation for their business. Michael Ha, “Lee Says Protest Deaths Heartbreaking, Deplorable,” Korea Times, 21 January 2009, http:// www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/include/print.asp?newsIdx=38284. 60. “Census of Population and Housing, 2010,” Statistics Korea, 1 November 2010, http://kostat.go.kr/portal/korea/kor_nw/2/1/index.board?bmode=read&aSeq=249070. 61. Changwon Yoon, “LH’s Urban Development Project,” Every News, 21 September 2012, http://www.everynews.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=917. 62. Marx, Capital, 1:131. 63. Ibid., 1:146–47. 64. Alongside this exchange of one commodity for another, Marx also provides a different form of circulation, M–C–M or M–C–M′, which refers to the transformation of money into commodity by ending with a greater value Mʹ. The difference between M and Mʹ is seen as surplus value. Ibid., 1:145–70. 65. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, 158. 66. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3. 67. Ibid. 68. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (1966), 20–23. 69. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), 46–67. 70. Ibid., 40. 71. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Maldon: Blackwell), 830–31. 72. Ibid., 40. 73. Foster, The Return of the Real, 54. 74. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant uses a metaphor of reason as a body, which is seen as an organized totality, by arguing: “To what extent a body may be organized, experience alone can inform us; and although, so far as our experience of this or that body has extended, we may not have discovered any inorganic part, such parts must exist in possible experience. But how far the transcendental division of a phenomenon must extend, we cannot know from experience – it is a question which experience cannot answer; it is answered only by the principle of reason which forbids us to consider the empirical regress, in the analysis of extended body, as ever



Thinking Sculpturally through Urban Transformation

137

absolutely complete.” Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855), 327–28. 75. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 825. 76. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Autumn 1990), 11; my emphasis. 77. In The Political Unconscious, Jameson describes the “cultural revolution”: “The triumphant moment in which a new systemic dominant gains ascendency is therefore only the diachronic manifestation of a constant struggle for the perpetuation and reproduction of its dominance, a struggle which must continue throughout its life course, accompanied at all moments by the systemic or structural antagonism of those older and newer modes of production that resist assimilation or seek deliverance from it.” Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), 85. 78. Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” 11–12. 79. Ibid. 80. Marx, Capital, 3:286–87. 81. Ibid., 3:286–90. 82. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 2006), 415. 83. Ibid., 415–16. 84. Ibid., 416. 85. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), 281. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid., 282–83. 89. Ibid., 282. 90. Ibid., 60. 91. Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” 9. 92. In “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production,” Sabel and Zeitlin define “mass production” as “the combination of single-purpose machines and unskilled labour to produce standard goods.” Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in NineteenthCentury Industrialization,” in Industrialisation: Critical Perspectives on the World Economy, ed. Patrick O’Brien (London: Routledge, 1998), 1:239. 93. Ibid. 94. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 52. 95. Ruth Glass, London: Aspects of Change (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1964), xviii. 96. Ibid., xix. 97. Ibid. 98. Peter Marcuse, “Gentrification, Abandonment, and Displacement: Connections, Causes, and the Policy Responses in New York City,” Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law 28 (January 1985), 225.

138

Chapter 4

99. Ibid., 216–17. 100. Ibid., 225. 101. Scott M. Stringer, “Mandatory Inclusionary Housing and the East New York Rezoning: An Analysis,” The City of New York Office of the Comptroller, 5 December 2015, p. 1, accessed 10 March 2016, http://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/ uploads/documents/Mandatory_Inclusionary_Housing_and_the_East_New_York_ Rezoning.pdf. 102. Ibid. 103. “Housing New York,” accessed 15 March 2016, http://www1.nyc.gov/site/ housing/index.page. 104. Ibid., 5. 105. Ibid., 7. 106. Rachael A. Woldoff, Lisa M. Morrison and Michael R. Glass, Priced Out: Stuyvesant Town and the Loss of Middle-Class Neighborhoods (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 91. 107. Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 65. 108. Tazi Phillips, “Soho, New York, Neighborhood Guide,” Timeout New York, 24 June 2015, http://www.timeout.com/newyork/manhattan/soho-manhattanneighborhood-guide. 109. Harvey Molotch and Mark Treskon, “Changing Art: SoHo, Chelsea and the Dynamic Geography of Galleries in New York City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (2009), 525. 110. “6th Brooklyn Real Estate Summit,” Realinsight, accessed 10 February 2016, http://brooklynsummit.com/.

Chapter 5

Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

1.  KRZYSZTOF WODICZKO’S HOMELESS VEHICLE The expansion of the idea of sculptural experimentation with the capitalist logic of urban place-making, which particularly includes uneven development, possession of land by dispossession, privatization and the transgression of space, is dominated by the logic of capital. I separate my argument from a simple criticism of the negative aspect of traditional public art, which is affirmatively attached to urban planning or urban design, by limiting its role of practical functionality and social responsibility as public furniture in the system of everyday life, because this can be one possible way to relate with or help urban space. However, my research focuses on finding ways in which a sculptural practice develops its paradoxical nature in and through the environment, and particularly through its political capacity to challenge, resist or even destroy the logic of capitalist uneven development. Here, the meaning of the environment is narrowed down as a dominant space of capitalism. An example of this would be Krzysztof Wodiczko’s sculptural project Homeless Vehicle (1999) (figure 5.1). Homeless Vehicle was made by transforming a supermarket trolley through the addition of more spaces and functions for sleeping, washing, sitting and storage. The vehicle was planned by the artist for homeless people, who have been evicted from their own places and have reduced spatial mobility, owing to their inability to afford their own place or to move. In the case of South Korean urbanization, for example, conflicts between a developer such as the state or a large construction company and the dwellers of a site cannot be avoided; this is accompanied by forced eviction and the problems of the evicted that have always been a social and political issue for society. The development procedure is extremely violent, aggressive and 139

140

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1  Krzysztof Wodiczko, Homeless Vehicle, 1988, The Clocktower Gallery brochure Krzysztof Wodiczko, Homeless Vehicle, 1988–89, Variant 3, Pictured in front of the Entrance to Trump Tower, New York. Source: © Krzysztof Wodiczko Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

141

exclusive. In many cases, people have to leave their places, whether they can afford to buy or rent a new space for living or not. Once old houses in slum areas have been replaced to create a new district, housing prices soar to unaffordable levels. This newly transformed dwelling space, therefore, is planned and produced not for the urban poor, because those people certainly cannot afford to buy the new houses. Mostly, low-income families are peripheralized and displaced to low-priced spaces or shantytowns in the outskirts of Seoul’s metropolitan area. The process of uneven development also brings about a rapid increase in the numbers of homeless people in the city. In South Korea, “As of the end of June [2011], a total of 4,403 people were classified as homeless, up from 4,187 people at the end of 2010, according to the data submitted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare.”1 In the context of art, the point in Wodiczko’s project is definitely not the evaluation of its actual capability as a practical solution to housing problems in the existing urban and social framework. Rather, the significance of Homeless Vehicle is its use of the political strategy of contradiction, in which urban space arises from a new practice by a particular group of people who are excluded from the dominant space of the city. In the logic of contradiction, Wodiczko’s homeless project is certainly critical of the capitalist production of space, which cannot be separated from the dispossession of underdeveloped space and the displacement of the minority from the centre to the periphery and from their own houses to public spaces and the streets. In the system of everyday life, the supermarket trolley is utilized as an essential means of the circulation of capital, which empowers the mode of production through an increase in consumption. This commercial instrument embodies and accelerates the social and political expansion of capitalism, which is mostly geographically uneven. In the process of uneven development, the evicted are constantly removed to the outside, such as streets, stations, parks, shanties or public shelters, becoming invisible and immobile in the space of the city. However, in Homeless Vehicle, the supermarket trolley acts as a political agent, which makes the evicted or minority power visible and active. The transformation of the supermarket trolley into a new mobile space for dwelling or an alternative way of living in the city gives the evicted a new possibility for being involved in and even challenging the system of urban space. Homeless Vehicle re-illuminates the political geography of the city by recovering the excluded right of sovereignty and freedom. It acts as a means of (re)production, enabling the evicted to produce new geographical politics in a city. Equipped with spatial mobility, the vehicle liberates homeless people from spaces of immobility and invisibility within publicly planned sites, such as shelters, by inventing possibilities for new places for both dwelling and transiting. Furthermore, users of the vehicles can choose their own

142

Chapter 5

routes – create their own spatial trajectories – according to their own modes of spatial production and possession; they are no longer governed from the outside or a dominant centre. This mobility provides the evicted with a new form of public intervention, which moves through and beyond the vertically hierarchized urban system by using the concept of self-reproduction. In this logic of self-reproduction, Homeless Vehicle constantly invents a mode of spatial systemization that can organize its structure and govern its space not only in the flexible relationship with external flows, but also in the creation of a radical autonomy in the environment. The spatial system that Homeless Vehicle provides, therefore, acts to regulate and maintain a difference from its environment by redefining and mobilizing existing boundaries. In the process, the supermarket trolley is transformed from the exclusive to the inclusive, the produced and the active. As a political instrument, the intervention of Wodiczko’s vehicle allows the evicted not only to transgress or even erase orders and limits that are produced by the dominant force of capitalism, but also to participate in the reproduction of everyday life as an active force of movement. “We will therefore suggest that this new and ultimate object may be designated, drawing on recent historical experience, as cultural revolution, that moment in which the coexistence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic, their contradictions moving to the very center of political, social, and historical life.”2 While a two-dimensional work, such as a painting, creates a certain order through the (re)production of an image, a sculptural work develops a principle of order through the politics of space or the urban. Certainly, it is considered a condition of being sculptural. A sculptural work, therefore, transits from things in space to the political dynamism – or production and deconstruction – of space. Most importantly, the object acts as an essential means of producing a sculptural work, owing to its function as a political dynamism of space. A sculptural work employs real things, whether small or large, not images of the object. The object is three-dimensional, which means that it already has a space in itself. In other words, space is immanent in the object. To install the object is, therefore, to create a space for the object. This space, which the object occupies, is the city, a real space or the space of everyday life. A sculptural practice participates directly in the system of urban space, entering and occupying everyday spaces of, for example, commercial galleries, national museums, streets, parks, supermarkets, government buildings, hospitals, houses and offices. The inclusion of real space as a body of work is not merely necessary for the creation of sufficient space for the spectator’s physical participation in the work; there can be an exception, like Asher’s caravan, which focuses less on a spectator’s immersive experience for the completion of the work, but requires the city. However, a sculptural work’s function as a dynamics of urbanism or its participation in urban space cannot be understood merely



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

143

as its transformation as a part of the operational system of the capital or its identification with urban space. Rather, in the expansion of these three aspects of sculptural practice – the sculptural work’s resistance, particularly to the capitalist system of collection and consumerism, the logic of mass production and uneven geographical development, which are evident in the case of urban transformation in Seoul – I find the political potentiality of the sculptural in the sculptural work’s contradictory relationship with capitalist urbanism. “The space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action; . . . in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power; yet . . . as such, it escapes in part from those who would make use of it.”3 Space is inherently political on the premise that not only the space itself, but also the individual objects are already filled with certain modes of control and ordering. In this way, urban space is seen as a contested zone, in that a sculptural work necessarily occupies a common ground in the space along with other urban practices, such as architecture and urban planning, but also, at the same time, utilizes and reproduces that space to actualize, systematize and express itself in a different way. In the regime of the sculptural, the occupation of a space by an object can, therefore, be understood as taking that space from others, intruding on the existing authority or established order. When an object is placed in a space, it cannot avoid forming a certain relationship with that space. And this relationship can be affirmative or destructive. In this respect, a sculptural work focuses on dealing with the politics of space or challenging the mechanism of the relationship between ordering and the space or the city. A sculptural practice, therefore, reorganizes the pre-established set of relations by producing and circulating a new geography of power relations through the politics of installation. This reproduction of power relations does not aim to eliminate an existing centre completely, but provides a new centre or centres in the space. It is a redistribution of power, whereby the established structure of power and function is transferred in a new logic of space, which is the sculptural. This is possible because sculpture acts as a force of externality, which is peripheralized from the centre of capitalist logic of rationality and functionalism. This position of the sculptural enables a sculptural work to be less restricted and, therefore, intervene critically with its environment. In the political dimension of the sculptural, a space can be a method of producing and distributing a particular mode of spatialization. Urban space in the regime of the sculptural, therefore, functions as a political agent, which enables a sculptural work to be conceptually or materially realized, visualized and expressed through the reproduction of the space; a sculptural work finds and creates a point of rupture in that space, into which a new deterritorializing force can penetrate so as to expand limits and boundaries of existing orders, relations and systems, and therefore provide a new continuity

144

Chapter 5

between different and discrete elements. Urban space is thought of as a built form, a given value or a spatial order and limit, whose intensity is reduced or even cancelled by the equalization of the sculptural. Urban space, therefore, becomes a site of conflict and control, in and through which a micro-politics of sculptural practice claims, exercises and legitimates its power of sovereignty, shifting the geography of the political regime in the space. In this respect, a sculptural work is produced as a form of urbanism and produces itself by structuring a space, particularly through the transformation of the political regime of the site, for example, from a military system to a vulnerable system or from an abstract space to a sculptural space. This means that a sculptural work constructs its own paradigm through the reconfiguration of power structures and relations. A sculptural practice is, therefore, not framed within the existing system of a map; rather, it invents a means of (re)mapping real spaces. The capability of the reproduction of the system of power relations is significant in determining the actualization of this sculptural method of mapping spaces. Whereas architecture and urban planning tend to systemize a space according to the logic of capital, functional efficiency, rationality and profitability, a sculptural practice reproduces that space but not by affirmatively referring to or representing the existing system of orders and relations. The politics of a sculptural practice, therefore, discovers and creates its transgressive value through the transformation of the conflicts and contradictions between different forces into a new form of continuity. As Deleuze argues, “Difference appears only as a reflexive concept.”4 The idea of reactivity – which is distinct from the traditional concept of modernist selfreflection – finds its significance in the realization and expansion of this sculptural transgressive value. Rather than a passive and affirmative action within the control of active force, reactivity premises a radical movement between points, intensities, differences or limits. Contradiction between the sculptural and the urban is, therefore, not considered simply a negation or discontinuity; it acts as the principle of a pure limit, whereby a sculptural work can be produced and can penetrate, creating a new intersection through the space of difference. In the process, the dominant system or intensity of urban space becomes vulnerable, conflictual and expansionary. In its contradictory relationship with its environment, a sculptural work becomes a particular form of urban dynamics, by which a neglected, or what I call invisible, principle of space or a new mode of spatialization can be recovered, visualized and legitimated through and beyond existing limits and intensities. The sculptural and the urban are inseparable and therefore symbiotic, which means that both require each other and each can change itself through the other to the extent that the sculptural and the urban are connected critically and contradictorily in the political strategy of resistance. The sculptural mode of urban



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

145

practice is more than the representation of a structured spatial arrangement or composition; rather, it is a reconstruction of cityscape towards a new political geography, converting the excluded to the included and the intensive to the extensive. 2.  SOCIETY AND SPACE IN KYUCHUL AHN’S INSTALLATIONS Urbanization has become a global phenomenon during the past forty decades. Compared with some developed countries, South Korea, especially the metropolitan area of Seoul, has experienced rapid urbanization since the 1960s. According to the World Bank, the gross national income per capita of South Korea has increased from US$2070 in 1981 to US$27,090 in 2014.5 However, data from Statistics Korea show that the rate of individual house ownership between 1978 and 2010 has remained almost constant, changing only from 59.9% to 60.9%.6 Urban population as a percentage of the national population increased from 27.7% in 1960 to 82.1% in 2013.7 The ratio of house price to annual income for the metropolitan area in South Korea is 10.1, which is higher than that for the United Kingdom (9.69) and for the United States (3.40).8 This means that those people who earn an average income would have to save their whole year’s income for more than ten years to purchase housing in Seoul. Unemployment and economic polarization are key factors that make urban housing environment unaffordable, unequal and unstable. In the process of urbanization in South Korea, conflicts between a developer, such as a large construction company, and the dwellers of a site cannot be avoided; this has always been accompanied with forced eviction and the problems of the evicted, which have been a serious social and political issue for society. The current tendency of redevelopment in Seoul has changed. Property owners, who are relatively affluent, voluntarily organize housing redevelopment and maintenance associations and actively lead redevelopment projects. These housing associations have a right to select construction and removal companies and work with the local authority. These groups of property owners pay a share of the expenses for the construction of new housing, in order to improve the quality and value of real estate and make more profit as a means of investment. In this case, poor owners in the associations cannot afford to pay the high cost of share expenses, and therefore, they mostly oppose the redevelopment projects and come into conflict with rich owners. Consequently, once a redevelopment project is successfully put in place, these poor owners have to sell their properties and leave their houses. This is a displacement made by internal forces, rather than external forces. South Korean urbanization can be characterized as a profit-driven urban

146

Chapter 5

renewal project, which takes place on a massive scale and is led by affluent housing owners, the government and large construction companies and private investors. The development procedure is extremely violent, aggressive and exclusive. In many cases, people have to leave their places, whether they can afford to buy or rent a new space for living or not. Once old houses in slum areas have been replaced to create a new district, housing prices soar to unaffordable levels. This newly transformed dwelling space, therefore, is planned and produced not for the urban poor, because those people certainly cannot afford to buy the new houses. Mostly, low-income families are peripheralized and displaced to low-priced spaces in the outskirts of Seoul’s metropolitan area. This process of uneven development also brings about the rapid increase of homeless people in the city and also the rent and estate value. Another recognized tendency of urban development in South Korea is the commercialization of urban space. Over the past few decades, residential areas of Seoul have rapidly been transformed into commercial spaces, replacing them with trendy restaurants, cafes and luxury boutiques. This particular tendency of the transformation of land use is certainly different from a largescale planned urban redevelopment, which is mostly led by the government or large developers and construction companies in order to provide a large number of housing units. This commercialization of space is, in most cases, led by affluent landlords or private investors, in order to earn more profit from the increased value of the property. These redeveloped areas attract more capital and investors and accordingly rent and real estate prices in the areas increase dramatically. One reason why a residential space is attractive to capital and investors is that its price is less expensive than that of a commercial space. Therefore, when this residential space is transformed into a commercial space, surplus value can be maximized through the large difference between investment expenses and increasing rent price and property value. In the field of art, particularly in South Korea, space has always been an issue. This includes not only territorial problems in South Korea, as the country is still one of the divided nations in the world, but also certain issues, raised from social and economic problems of housing and dwelling in the rapid changes of urban space. For example, the sculptural installation works of Kyuchul Ahn, a well-known Korean artist and professor at Korea National University of Arts, present a new possibility of urbanism. In his national and international exhibitions and biennales, Ahn has explored everyday objects and spaces to discover a new aspect of life, participating, intervening in and reinterpreting various spaces in the condition of urban environment through the process of conceptualization and visualization. Most of his works encourage viewers’ participation in the spaces he constructed; a viewer is encouraged to experience those spaces as a passer-by, an occupant or an observer. In 2004, Ahn’s fifth solo exhibition, Forty-Nine Rooms, was presented at



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

147

the Rodin Gallery (currently renamed as Plateau) in Seoul. This exhibition focused on his latest projects, which included three installation works and eight object and text-based practices. Three installation works were constructed in relation to the concept of room. The first installation was Bottomless Room (2004). This work is made by the reconstruction of a real one-bedroom apartment for a single person in South Korea. Ahn used a blueprint to rebuild the house to the same plan as the original apartment (figure 5.2). The work is cut in half and only the upper part of the construction is suspended in the middle of the exhibition space. Viewers can walk in and through the hanging place. In this work, Ahn provides a critique of an aspect of nomadic life in contemporary society in South Korea. His work focuses on the changing idea of dwelling, which has been transformed from a permanent place for shelter, rest and protection to a transit place, such as an airport, bus stop, shopping mall, where people cannot occupy or reside in the place. High housing prices turn people’s hopes of having their own houses into idealized dreams, which can hardly happen in real life. Rising rents push people out of their long-time residential places, in search of cheaper alternatives. In South Korea, houses are mostly

Figure 5.2  Kyuchul Ahn, Bottomless Room, 540 cm × 360 cm × 122 cm, plywood and various materials, 2004. © Kyuchul Ahn.

148

Chapter 5

commercialized as products, which are used as means of investment to earn more economic profits. In the metropolitan area of Seoul, the majority of people live in high-rise residential buildings and apartments. Depending on the brand-name and location, housing prices vary dramatically. Bottomless Room also re-illuminates the current changes in household and family composition, from extended family houses to single-family house. This social phenomenon has certainly been affected by the decline in marriage and birth rates, particularly to a group of people, who are not able to afford to rent or purchase a house, to support a family and to raise a child. A rootless life becomes common, especially in the large cities. It is extremely difficult to stay in one place, because many factors incessantly force people to search for another place to move to. The shifting condition of rent and the housing market can, of course, be a major factor in this tendency. In addition, various personal and family circumstances make people choose a nomadic life, for example, in changing jobs, schools or health conditions. In South Korea, Seoul has a population of 23,480,000 and is ranked the fifth largest metropolitan area in the world. Paris is twenty-ninth largest, at 10,858,000, and New York is ninth at 20,630,000.9 Its area is about 605.28 km2.10 It forms the cultural, commercial, financial, industrial, and residential centre of South Korea. With this density of population and geographical limitations, housing has always been an issue in the metropolitan area. Moreover, the enthusiasm for education in South Korea is relatively high. Even though rent and housing prices are extremely high, particularly in Gangnam School District 8, there has always been a long line of waiting lists, looking for a place in the area. These people tend to stay in that area temporarily and most move elsewhere after their children leave the school. Room With 112 Doors (2003–2004) is a large spatial construction, which is composed of forty-nine small rooms, large enough only for one person. This work creates an open, yet closed space, as the four side walls of each room are made of doors, which allow people to enter a room anytime and pass through the space from every side. A door can be used as both an entrance and an exit. It is, therefore, a space that a person cannot possess, but only occupy temporarily. Ahn explores a certain tendency of anxiety and insecurity in contemporary society, which makes people always conscious of the eyes of others around them. This phenomenon can frequently be observed in people who live in populous centres of big cities, rather than in those who dwell in small rural areas. In a big company, for example, people should work with other people. Their working processes are usually monitored by others, such as coworkers or superiors in the group, not only because any mistake or problem can be avoided in this process, but also because a person can be evaluated, to determine whether he or she is a competent employee in the group. Incompetence causes forced retirement. Incompetence is, in many cases, graded on



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

149

a curve, which means that winning a competition with others can be the only way of proving a person’s ability and competence. In the age of limitless competition, especially in a market economy system, surveillance and evaluation become more severe on all people. A power relation definitely exists in surveillance and evaluation. This relation affects or even controls a person’s idea and behaviour, making him or her conscious of the eyes of others. Foucault’s famous description of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in Discipline and Punish, first published in French in 1975,11 emphasizes that a specific type of space becomes a sociopolitical apparatus or machine, whereby a certain rule of movement, visibility and, indeed, power can be proposed and legitimized. In the case of the Panopticon, prisoners in a circular building are monitored through their spatial isolation and the possibility of invisible surveillance from a central tower. Human behaviour is, therefore, patterned; this patterned behaviour is constantly changed, interacting with specific conditions and changes in the surrounding environment. Every space has its own spatial law and logic, in which the path of flow and the line of sight can be shaped in a different way. Through its machinic and repetitive operation in a spatial law, a certain type of socio-spatial practice takes place. In other words, if someone enters a place, it means that he or she must be directly or indirectly affected by the law of that place. Like actual space, cyberspace is composed of different types of public and private, socio-cultural and political spaces, in which complex human interactions take place and relations are both formed and re-formed. An important aspect in the formation of virtual space is that space–time and physical restrictions have mostly been overcome. In other words, virtual space provides free and unlimited access to other people’s sites. The boundaries of private space becomes blurred, inevitably connected, entered by and shared with the anonymity of multiple people from all over the world. In this condition of the freedom of movement, a majority of people have often been victims of improper invasion of privacy. In cyberspace, a certain form of surveillance, control and invasion are recognized. Like the Panopticon, cyberspace is in the invisible gaze of people, which trace users’ virtual movement, store all access data, contacts and even geographical locations (through internet protocol addresses). When a user turns on his or her computer, the computer immediately begins a dialogue with other local area networks through its Ethernet adaptor. This virtual space can be travelled through the computer, which is controlled by digital language. Digital language is based on the process of coding and decoding information, transforming received data into abstract forms, such as numbers, passwords and codes. As Foucault argues, the ‘‘enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work

150

Chapter 5

of writing links the centre and the periphery.’’12 In the reality, virtual space is controlled and systemized by this invisible system of digital language and network. The space of Room With 112 Doors is controlled and structured by the logic of fragment. Once a person enters a room, he or she cannot see the whole space, but maintains a fragmented relationship with the space. This fragmentized space increases people’s anxiety and insecurity, as this place is not for residence and, once they enter the space, they have to continuously move from one place to another and find a way to go out without knowing the whole. In this maze-like space, every room is exactly the same and a person has to choose one out of the multiple of samenesses, in order to move to the next space. Uncertainty can emerge, when people encounter this kind of repetition of identical space, because they cannot be sure about where they have to go or what they have to choose. This uncertainty can be understood in terms of a particular phenomenon of the shifting condition of contemporary society. In particular, in the space of capitalism, the mass production of images, productions and even places provides a particular controlled social, spatial, cultural and economic environment, which forces people to select one from a multiple of samenesses. Uncertainty is inevitable, because this space keeps changing depending on the outcome of market competition, which is followed by the reconfiguration and reordering of spaces, relations and systems. In the exhibition, a large-scale site-specific installation, Unshakable Room transforms the exhibition space by filling the space with innumerable square timbers. These timbers stretch from one end of the space to the other and are nailed to support every side of the space so that the space does not shake and is prevented from collapse or other unexpected accidents. This work can be related to emotional and psychological aspects of uncertainty or, in the extreme sense, anxiety disorders, which incessantly cause the feeling of anxiety, fear and grave doubt and increase the sense of crisis about the reality. Anxiety is, in general, understood as worry about future events and fear as concerns over current events. This anxiety and fear become a desire for fixing or, in other words, making things unshakeable. Furniture, such as a chair, a desk and a bed, are suspended in the middle of the space and precariously placed on the square timbers, which penetrate through the space inside and outside the furniture. Ironically, this is not a room where a person can rest and sleep every day, enjoying relaxation, recovery, peace and protection. In our contemporary society, people find it increasingly difficult to trust each other. People can be distrustful in politics, press or technology. Truth or facts can easily be distorted. It can be said that our society is full of exaggeration, illusion and distortion, particularly in the control of the power of capital. This trend of mutual distrust incessantly causes people to live in a state of anxiety and fear. Unshakable Room provides a continuity between



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

151

opposites and differences, that is, the relationship between stability and anxiety. As Ahn states, “Even though I am doing art, I keep doubting art.”13 A critical view of reality can be an essential factor for Ahn in producing his works. A work of art discovers and emerges in and through a space or gap between heterogeneous elements. Discovering this gap begins when one takes a critical perspective, which breaks and shakes established things and ideas by creating a new relationship. Ahn’s persistent exploration of the relationship between dwelling and space can be found in another work in his solo exhibition at Gallery Space in Seoul in 2009. In this exhibition, three types of houses were presented. A House of 2.6 Square Meters (2009), for example, is a foldable space for a single person, constructed from plywood. The ceiling can be unfolded, so that the room receives a lot of sunlight in the daytime. A wall is composed of a door and a ramp, and can be opened and used for both entrance and exit. The ramp is extended to the ground. This is a compact space, in which many things, functions and concepts are pressed into a tiny space. In this work, certain domestic objects, such as a bed, a desk, a chair and a bookcase, are placed in the house, which acts as an architectural role, creating different functions of space, such as for sleeping, working and storage. When the door, slope and ceiling are folded back, the space turns into a completely closed cubic form, which can easily be transported to another place. It is a space where staying and leaving coexist. In the metropolitan area of Seoul, there are certain types of residential space for the poor, such as Jjock-bang and Goshiwon. Jjock-bang is a place that offers very cheap lodging, generally by providing only minimal services. In Korean, jjock means the act of dividing a large unit into small parts and bang indicates a room. Jjock-bang has a number of separate rooms in a building, each room intended for a single occupant. A goshiwon was originally designed for accommodation for examinees or students, who live in the place in a short period, mostly while studying for an important test, or if their normal homes are far from their schools. Goshiwon are usually rented in short-term leases; each room includes minimal furnishing, such as a bed and a desk. The occupants use a shared bathroom. There is often a common room for laundry and cooking. These dwelling spaces are, in general, built from extremely cheap materials, having thin walls, a tiny window and terrible heating systems. A person in one room can hear whispering in the next room through the thin walls. The population of jjock-bang areas in Seoul dramatically increased during the 1997–1998 Korea financial crisis and swelled over 150,000 in 2010.14 Rather than illuminating the poor and terrible conditions of dwelling places in urban spaces in Seoul, in A House of 2.6 Square Meters (2009), Ahn attempts to challenge certain established ideas about homeless people and

152

Chapter 5

dwelling by presenting a new form of portable house. In this work, a small dwelling space is changed into a contemplative space, in which a person can rest and enjoy his or her life sleeping, reading books or watching the sun or the moon and the stars in the sky through a ceiling window. Once this house is folded back, it can easily be transported to another place. By looking at a particular tendency of the disappearance of homeless people from public places, such as streets, parks, stations, to isolated shelters and of the poor from the centre to the periphery, becoming invisible, this work emphasizes the fact that everyone in a society has the right to live in freedom and safety, including homeless people or single impoverished people.

3.  THE MODES OF PRODUCTION OF SPACE IN RICHARD SERRA’S TERMINAL AND MONIKA SOSNOWSKA’S 1:1 By further expanding the problem of the political relationship between the production of a sculptural work and the city, this section examines the concept of the sculptural by rethinking issues and limitations raised in the current understanding of sculptural practice, specifically focusing on the mode of the production of space through the particular examples of sculptural practice. This study particularly focuses on ways in which a sculptural work has changed its relation with, understanding of, and operation in and through the environment. It is because space obviously becomes and functions as an essential element for constructing a sculptural work, now that sculpture has been emancipated from its pedestalization. To elaborate my concept of the sculptural, I intend to reconsider the term “sculpture,” particularly as used in Richard Serra’s interview with Peter Eisenman: RS: When sculpture enters the realm of the non-institution, when it leaves the gallery or museum to occupy the same space and place as architecture, when it redefines space and place in terms of sculptural necessities, architects become annoyed. Not only is their concept of space being changed, but for the most part it is being criticized . . . PE: You want architecture to be a neutral background, when architecture comes off the wall and off the pedestal, you seem to want it to remain as a discrete object, to maintain its neutrality. When architecture becomes both figural and contextual, it worries you because it leaves the sculptor with little room to operate.15

According to Serra’s comments in this interview, sculpture creates its own place by differentiating itself from its surroundings, especially architecture.



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

153

The problem of space is mainly considered an important element of the formation of sculpture. Historically, the emancipation of sculpture from the domain of architecture can be found in the modernist movement of art, in which sculpture is no longer considered a decorative ornament or a function for a specific public space or urban site. What I claim in this study is not a return to the modernist relationship between sculpture and architecture; nor do I intend to reduce Serra’s account of sculpture to the logic of neither/ nor, such as “non-architecture” and “non-landscape.” Rather, I believe that it is essential to rethink this sculpture’s emancipation from architecture by expanding on our understanding of the concept of sculpture, or what I call the sculptural and its relation not only to architecture, but also, on a large scale, to the environment or the urban from a different perspective, because the territory of the sculptural cannot be determined passively by using, for example, the dichotomic framework between institution and non-institution or between site and non-site. In other words, it is important to consider and provide a certain form of continuity between sculptural work and its site, which is shareable and redistributable. The significance of Serra’s description of sculpture can be related to the point at which space cannot be occupied or monopolized merely by one spatial movement or rule, because space is obviously a contested zone, in which different ideas, rules, movements and elements necessarily coexist, conflict and reconcile in the process of change. Another point in Serra’s argument that I would like to focus on and expand is the question of the ways in which a sculptural work forms a relationship with its surrounding, including not only architecture, but also the urban or the built environment; and how this relationship with the space contributes to constructing and expanding the territory of the sculptural without reducing the sculptural to either the urban or the space. Referring to the idea of the urban, the realm of art (or the sculptural in particular) is, however, relatively less controlled by the rationalization and bureaucratic regulation of, for example, capitalism. This means that art places itself critically in the existing systems and relations of urban space, that is, within the social, political or economic orderings and rules, rather than settling safely within a certain boundary. Art can even be contradictory to urban space, which is controlled more by the circulation of capital. However, this does not mean that sculpture is completely separate from urban space, but that it finds and builds a new line of movement in and through reality. Thus, the expanded concept of the sculptural has a complex relationship with its surroundings or the built environment. This relation can be violent, but it can also be interdependent, whereby the sculptural and space can affect each other. In this respect, this section aims to investigate the sculptural mode of territorialization, particularly considering the ways in which a sculptural

154

Chapter 5

work is produced or shapes itself in the contradictory relationships with its surroundings by penetrating the spaces of urban strata. From a political perspective, “territory” and “territoriality” are different terms. Territoriality is necessarily identified with the two concepts of space and power. It can be understood as a method that transforms a space to a territory. Territoriality is not merely the possession of a single physical place; rather it can create a new possibility of difference. It is an ability to enter the boundary of a new space, while at the same time systemizing and maintaining distinct elements and relations as a unity within a particular law. Territoriality visualizes itself in the process of exercising two different types of power to a space. One type of power is that which breaks certain limitations or which challenges established relationships and ideas. The other type creates a network of movement by gathering different elements and relationships. Territory can, however, be understood as a particular (conceptual or material) form of space, which is maintained by a certain type of territoriality. Territory provides a (porous) space, in which new territoriality can constantly enter into and visualize itself. Hence, territory is a contested zone, intermingled by conflicts, movements and differences. In Human Territoriality, Robert Sack claims: Territoriality is a primary geographical expression of social power. It is the means by which space and society are interrelated. . . . Territoriality serves as a device to keep space emptiable and fillable. The combinations of reification and displacement could lead to a magical mystical perspective. Reification through territory is a means of making authority visible. Displacement through territory means having people take the visible territorial manifestations as the sources of power. The first makes the sources of power prominent, whereas the second disguises them. When the two are combined they can lead to a mystical view of place or territory.16

In the process of (capitalist) urbanization, territorialization is absolutely affected and determined by the accumulation and circulation of capital. Space (for example, the space of market) is an essential factor for the expansion and accumulation of capital, because capital accumulation is not only manifested in, but also affected by space. Historically, the patterns of capital accumulation have been varied in the different phases of time and society. However, a dominant pattern of capital accumulation can be seen in the fact that capital tends towards dynamics of concentration. Concentration is a necessary process, whereby capital accumulates, expands and flows. It can be understood in terms of the concepts of space and power. It is the process of gathering different things and ideas into a certain spatial point or centre. It also refers to an increase in strength, density and intensity. Capital is necessarily



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

155

territorialized and accumulated within a fixed and discrete spatial condition, through which the efficiency of production process can be maximized. “Capital must be fixed for long periods of time in the production process in the form of machinery, factory buildings, transport facilities and other direct and indirect means of production.”17 Harvey claims that centralization produces agglomerations of activity, which tend towards a “‘structured coherence’ within geographical regions” in a collaborative way.18 In the process of centralization, a space tends towards the state of fixity, combining all these differences, whereby things and ideas can be accumulated and concentrated as a united whole. However, this fixity is ephemeral, because capital acts as an ever-expanding demand or value. One of the reasons – Marx insisted on it – is that the concentration of capital necessarily entails over-accumulation and a fall in surplus value. Accordingly, when a space encounters barriers or limits in the process of accumulation and of (capital) flow, the space tends to open up and transcend the difficulties of its existing systems and boundaries. In many cases, old systems and relations can be destroyed, entering a course of crisis. Capital fixity, thus, produces capital mobility. This can be an aspect of successive systemic cycles of capital accumulation in space. In this respect, urban territoriality cannot simply be reduced to either a static spatial point or a movement; rather, it operates in the contradiction between mobility and fixity. In the interactive connection between mobility and fixity, territoriality constantly proposes and actualizes new ways of using, deploying and systemizing a space or spatial elements for the survival from competition between rival producers. By exercising its power expansively yet coercively, territoriality, thus, refers not only to the colonization of a space, but also to the transgression of boundaries and borders. The uneven and conflictual movements or powers attend to and encounter zones of territory. In the context of art, however, sculptural territorialization is a definitely different concept from the concepts of urban space and the built environment. Sculptural territorialization is not confined in the conditions of social and economic movements, which need a certain kind of negotiation between people or powers. What I mean by the traditional idea of negotiation is that which premises the production of a potential or actual form of agreement or consensus. Sculptural territorialization, rather, is the invasion – in other words, the construction or destruction – of urban space, not only of the physical form of that space, but also of spatial rules and orders by entering into an existing system and relation. Expanding Sack’s account of territoriality, we discover that the territory of the sculptural necessarily includes participation in a given space, which may be either institutional or non-institutional. This can be seen as an essential element that establishes the sculptural. What is different from any other discipline, such as urban engineering and architecture, which also need a certain kind of spatial participation, is

156

Chapter 5

the fact that the sculptural territorialization cannot be equated simply with the commodification of space, which is completely controlled by the change and movement of capital. This is because artists can, of course, gain some economic benefits from circulating their artworks in the art market or receive financial support from foundations, companies or the government. However, this does not mean that the aim in producing a work of art is to circulate or commercialize it in the market according to the logic of the market economy. For example, in the development of urban space, particularly in South Korea, the commodification of space, led by the government or private corporations, has been problematic because it results in underdevelopment of housing finance; unproductive government intervention on property speculation; ineffective tax support for low-income home purchase and the structure of the rental sector; an uneven housing policy between supply and demand, and a problem in distribution of profits or wealth, all of which are quite distinct from the sustainable and equitable expansion of space-ownership. Therefore, it is impossible to reduce a work of art to a certain form of commodity, a political activity or an urban space in a literal sense. In other words, the potential role of a sculptural work is not to reproduce or imitate the problematic current socio-economic and political system or regime of urban space as a sculptural version; however, a sculptural work adopts a critical or even contradictory position to the previous or current movements or changes of urban space and proposes a certain form of relation with that space, so as to expand the existing limitations of ideas and knowledge. The important point of the aim of the production of a sculptural work is to discover the ways in which a work of art can relate to, resist, intervene in or integrate with a given space through and beyond the existing (social, economic or political) boundaries of space. In this respect, it is important to know how we understand the space or urban space as the space forms an essential part of the sculptural work. A particular tendency of urbanism – such as my example of South Korean urban development – can, therefore, be to create an opportunity of lack of sight, through which a work of art can emerge by expanding and transferring the space to a different idea and form through the sculptural mode of territorialization. I also focus on the transition from the possession of land to the use of land. The sculptural work shapes itself, making a new form of relationship with its environment, particularly through two contradictory modes of sculptural territorialization, non-environmental and trans-environmental. These modes of territorialization can be understood as realizing the act of spatial redistribution or the method of using a space within a given space. In the process of interaction between these two modes of territorialization, a work of art moves from an idea to a certain form of territoriality, such as from a sedentary to a nomadic mode or from a vertical to a horizontal mode, passing through the urban space.



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

157

First, a sculptural work presents an idea through a non-environmental mode of territorialization. In this mode, a work of art functions and is formed according to the logic of contradiction. This logic of contradiction has been neglected in some modernist sculpture, such as the steel sculptures of David Smith, Alexander Calder and Anthony Caro. These particular examples of modernist sculpture were also installed in public sites outside institutions. Rather than their active relationship with their surroundings, however, they focus on the relatively internal spatiality of the work, which is often pictorially expanded or composed by adjusting different parts in the principle of a part-to-whole relation. In the expanded concept of the sculptural, particularly the non-environmental mode, by contrast, the problem of the interiority of space is transferred to an active form of engagement with the surroundings. In Serra’s Terminal, for example, presented in the Documenta VI exhibition in Kassel in 1977, directed by Manfred Schneckenburger, he constructed a site-specific work using corten steel plates, each side of which was composed of four 2.74 metre × 3.66 metre trapezoid plates. These four pieces of steel plate lean against each other like unstable walls. The structure of this sculpture allows viewers to walk inside the work through the space between two steel plates, which lean unstably against each other. The top of the piece is also open. This work was installed on a traffic island in front of a train depot in Bochum, Germany, and is surrounded by moving traffic and passers-by. This traffic island – which seems like a leftover space between two traffic lanes – is not only conceived as a kind of non-place, which provides incessant movement, rather than stasis, but it also provides a clear boundary that divides Serra’s work from its surroundings. As Serra emphasizes, “How the work alters a given site is the issue, not the persona of the author. . . . Once the works are erected in a public space, they become other people’s concerns.”19 Sculptural work not only makes a significant connection with a space by entering into existing relations and systems, but also the space is inseparable from the formation of the sculptural, because it can be a medium for producing a work of art or even presenting a work of art as a new form of urbanism. Serra focuses on questions about the development of a new spatial logic and movement through sculpture’s internal necessity and about the mechanisms of a sculpture’s construction and how it alters a given space. In Serra’s case, contradiction plays an important role in the production of a sculpture’s own space. Here, the meaning of contradiction cannot be understood as the complete negation of or disconnection from the work’s environment. Rather than using found (industrial) products or objects – which can easily be transferred to a certain social, historical or political form – Serra experiments with and challenges existing limitations and boundaries of structural rules, scales and materials and expands their possibility to the level of the absurd.20 Serra’s work demonstrates contradiction

158

Chapter 5

in that it acts to distinguish itself from its environment, for example, from any kind of social, political and historical contexts. Because of its appearance not only with the scale in a given space, but also with the negation of affirmation or negotiation, Serra’s work, however, has had many social, cultural and political influences.21 In this non-environmental tendency of sculptural territorialization – instead of disappearing into a given space, as in Michael Asher’s work Sculpture – a sculptural work appears and visualizes itself in parallel with its environments; and forms and expands its territory by inviting the surroundings within and through its body of work. I think that sculpture, if it has any potential at all, has the potential to create its own place and space, and to work in contradiction to the places and spaces where it is created in this sense. I am interested in work where the artist is a maker of “anti-environment” which takes its own place or makes its own situation, or divides or declares its own area.22

By expanding Serra’s notion of sculpture, the non-environmental mode of territorialization, therefore, cannot be reduced merely to the modernist logic of negation, specifically of neither architecture nor landscape, nor, as in Rosalind Krauss’s model, can it be categorized into two kinds of sculpture at the same time: a marked site (between non-landscape and landscape) and an axiomatic structure (between non-architecture and architecture).23 Rather, it has a complex relationship with its environment. This is definitely related to the sedentary pattern of spatial distribution through which one space is juxtaposed with another space, rather than layered within it. Here, what I mean by juxtaposition is the act of placing spaces alongside each other, without either one invading the other. This non-environmental mode redefines a given space by dividing the sculptural space from the surroundings. The zone of sculpture, therefore, acts as a centralized, closed regime of space, which can provide and circulate a particular spatial principle of partitioning land. A sculptural work in this non-environmental mode occupies a space between different places and proposes a principle of passing and transferring one from the other, rather than including it in either one place or another. It changes the space as disjunctive, fragmented, independent and opaque, experimenting with the pure logic of construction in the realm of the urban. The sculptural work does not negotiate with architectural concepts and constructions. As sculptural work necessarily occupies the same space and place as architecture, therefore, the conflicts between sculptural work and other urban occupiers, such as architecture or sociopolitical concept and ideology, are inevitable. Sculptural work rather negates an art work’s functionalization as a symbol of a pre-established space, for example, in representing the problematic site of the Federal Plaza in New York, which is “excessively defined by the presence of government



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

159

and representative of the American justice system.”24 This opaqueness of the non-environmental mode of sculptural space proposes and challenges its own method of appearing or visualizing the territory of the sculptural, participating in the space of the mutual incompatible in urban reality. Second, sculptural practice proposes a trans-environmental mode of territorialization. This sculptural mode can be found in, for instance, Monika Sosnowska’s sculptural practice. Like Serra, Sosnowska works primarily with space. In contrast with Serra’s sculpture, she presents a different pattern of spatial distribution. She focuses on the issues and problems occurring in urban space. The approach of her work is distinguished from what urban engineers or architects do, such as utilitarianism, functionality, effectiveness and rationality, because she apparently works with problems that architects or urban engineers have overlooked. She provides a spatial proposition, which places itself against an architectural or urbanist logic of rationality. This may be why her sculptural works have often been read as surrealistic or illusionary. For example, in the installation work 1:1 – which was presented in the Polish pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 and curated by Sebastian Cichocki – Sosnowska provides a black architectural frame, which was reconstructed from parts of actual typical Polish buildings and houses built in the 1960s in the era of the Polish People’s Republic. This gigantic framework is squashed into the interior space of the Polish pavilion (figure 5.3). In the late Polish socialism of the 1960s, Polish urbanization was often seen as a rapid, impulsive modernization. According to Wojciech Roszkowski, “Communism in Poland had always been oppressive and lawless since it did not respect even its own laws and in the years 1944–56 Polish Communism was even ‘criminal.’”25 Urbanization in Poland was mainly controlled by the command economy, which can be characterized as having two aspects. The first is central planning and regulation of the economy, which can be a copy of the Soviet model, aiming to maximize economic potential as the required base for political and military rule of the communist regime. The other is an industry-driven economic system, which forms a strong interrelationship between urbanization and industrialization.26 Urban development during this particular period in Poland was central and directed from top to bottom, led by the state. In the process of de-Stalinization, which occurred in the late 1950s, Poland experienced a rapid transition from a command economic system to a market-based economy in less than five years.27 Architecture was utilized as and reduced to an important reformation instrument for constructing a new social ideology and order. Those buildings and houses that were built in the 1960s and 1970s in Poland still have a certain tendency towards “socialist realism.”28 This socialist realism was originally derived from the Soviet Union; it strongly depicts socialist ideology and provides and utilizes most artistic forms, such as statues, monuments, sculptures, paintings,

160

Chapter 5

Figure 5.3  Monika Sosnowska, 1:1, 2007, Polish Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007 photo by Jan Smaga. Source: © Courtesy the artist, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw; The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Kurimanzutto, Mexico; Hauser & Wirth, New York.



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

Figure 5.3  (continued)

161

162

Chapter 5

Figure 5.4a  The Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw, Poland. “The Place of Culture and Science in Warsaw, constructed in 1955, was a gift from the Soviet Union to the people of the Poland”. Source: “The Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw, Poland,” Wikimedia Commons, last modified, 21st March, 2016, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:PKiN_widziany_z_WFC.jpg.

music, literature and architecture, for the purpose of glorifying communism. The dominant characteristics of social realistic architecture are teleological, as it purposefully delivers socialist ideologies and principles through the space of architecture; the aesthetic value of a building is exactly identified with its political and military value; and it evokes monumentality, skyscrapers, massiveness, political and industrial powers, which are transferred to essential elements for building communism (figure 5.4). Although Sosnowska’s work refers to the particular historical background of Polish urbanization, it is not nostalgic. Neither does it describe or represent



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

163

Figure 5.4b  Wave Houses, Gdansk, Poland. “The Polish port city of Gdansk has prefabricated apartment blocks from the 1960s and 1970s that are supposed to look like waves from the nearby Baltic Sea. Called ‘wave houses’, they take up whole city blocks. The largest is 850 metres long and is said to be the third-longest apartment building in Europe.” “Photo Gallery: Glories of Socialist Architecture,” Spiegel Online, 29th July, 2011, http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/photo-gallery-glories-of-socialist-architecture-fotostrecke-70849-15.html. Source: “Wave Houses, Gdansk, Poland,” Wikimedia Commons, last modified 19th January, 2006, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:GDANSK,_Falowiec_na_Obroncow_Wybrzeza.JPG.

an aspect of architectural history as a form of sculpture. Rather, it holds a critical relationship with architecture and the built environment. This critical relationship of Sosnowska’s work is different from that of Serra. Whereas Serra constructs his sculptural work through the work’s contradictory relationship with the site of installation or the historical and geographical givenness, by reorganizing the space according to the logic of the divisible, Sosnowska experiments with the idea of contradiction by transforming a site into a new political zone, within which different forces and ideas coexist and interact, producing a new form of continuity in the politics of the indivisible, rather than existing as distinct forms and orders. This may be why Sosnowska produces a new transformed space through the reconstruction of parts of actual typical Polish buildings and houses built in the 1960s in the era of the Polish People’s Republic, instead of creating something new in a

164

Chapter 5

site. Sosnowska’s work emphasizes the idea of reproduction, which certainly requires an interactive or reflexive relationship between different things and ideas, for example, between a contemporary idea of capitalist urbanism and a communist idea of urbanism, between the past and the present or between the regime of art and the regime of politics. In terms of the politics of the indivisible, Sosnowska’s work expands the space of the urban or the external space of art institutions, for example, the Polish buildings of the 1960s, through a different form of spatial system, which is the internal space of art institutions that is also considered an essential part of urban system. Sosnowska describes her work: It seems to me that what I do is somehow in opposition to what architecture stands for. I also think that my art is a completely different discipline, even though I focus on the same problems as architecture does: the forming of space. Utilitarianism is architecture’s fundamental attribute. My works introduce chaos and uncertainty instead.29

The trans-environmental mode of territorialization, which I find expressed in Sosnowska’s work, is a means of building one space within another. Layering can be an important method in this trans-environmental mode, in the sense that it does not accumulate different spaces and elements in a historical order, but is an act of blurring existing boundaries and borders, through which different forces and powers can encounter and produce something new. This trans-environmental mode constantly translates or transverses one space into another. Layering one space onto another is a way of making a new connection between different elements, instead of distinguishing one from the other. In Sosnowska’s case, a new contradictory movement is created through the space in which Polish modernist architecture is layered into the space of Sosnowska’s art. Sosnowska’s work, therefore, creates a space in motion or in transformation. The role of sculptural work in the trans-environmental mode is to provide a new spatial order or proposition between different existing spaces, whereby the space – occupied and produced by the sculptural work – becomes a conjunctive, penetrable, sharable and interdependent site, allowing conflictual movements and relations to encounter in the inclusive system of the sculptural. This mode of the sculptural places itself in the space between the imagined and the real, between the potential and the actual, entering a given space and conceptually and materially transforming or reproducing that space as a part of the work itself. This method of contradictory layering, therefore, functions according to the logic of the indivisible, which creates a decentralized movement through the spaces. In this way, a sculptural work invents a new mode of distribution of different and heterogeneous elements in and through the open, undivided and unlimited space of the sculptural.



Practising Urbanism in the Logic of the Sculptural

165

A work of art becomes a differential space, that is to say, a site of producing a continuous movement, crossing one territory to another, rather than constructing a certain kind of opaque and disjunctive space. NOTES 1. “Homeless Population Rises Despite Gov’t Welfare Programs,” Yonhap News Agency, 25 September 2011, http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2011/09/25/03 02000000AEN20110925000800320.HTML. 2. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), 95; my emphasis. 3. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 26. 4. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2004), 43. 5. “Data: GNI per capita, Atlas Method (Current US$),” The World Bank, accessed 12 February 2016, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD. 6. “The Rate of Individual House Ownership,” Statistics Korea, accessed 15 February 2016, http://www.index.go.kr/potal/main/EachDtlPageDetail.do?idx_cd=1239. 7. “Data: Urban Population (% of Total),” Indexmundi, accessed 16 March 2016, http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/korea/urban-population. 8. “House Price to Income Ratio of the Metropolitan Area in South Korea,” Korea Housing Survey, 14 April 2015, http://www.hnuri.go.kr/stat/stat_byYearSearchViewPage.do?bbsId=BBSMSTR_000000000011&nttId=311. 9. “List of Urban Areas by Population,” Wikipedia, accessed 19 February 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_by_population. 10. “Seoul,” The Academy of Korean Studies, accessed 12 February 2016, http:// terms.naver.com/entry.nhn?docId=574440&mobile&cid=46618&categoryId=46618. 11. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 1995). 12. Ibid., 197. 13. “Kyuchul Ahn’s 49 Rooms,” Hankook Ilbo, 3 March 2004, http://news.naver. com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=001&oid=038&aid=0000222722. 14. “The Population of Jjock-bang Areas in Seoul,” Edaily, 22 April 2012, http:// www.edaily.co.kr/news/NewsRead.edy?SCD=JD21&newsid=01121766599498744 &DCD=A00402&OutLnkChk=Y. 15. Richard Serra, Writings, Interviews (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 146. 16. Robert D. Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5–38; my emphasis. 17. Jae-Yong Chung and Richard J. R. Kirkby, The Political Economy of Development and Environment in Korea (London: Routledge, 2002), 16. 18. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books Ltd., 2010), 195.

166

Chapter 5

19. Serra, Writings, Interviews, 151. 20. Serra describes his work, “Understanding the pragmatic limitations of various contexts, be it accessibility, surface or subsurface condition, load potential, is part of my work, and I come up against the same problems a structural engineer comes up against. I have always been interested in testing the limits and assumptions of socalled structural rules, engineering codes. I have attempted to take the possibilities and practice of engineering to absurd lengths.” Ibid., 168. 21. Serra states, “The work [Terminal] has met with much disapproval. The resistance has been voiced by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the conservative right-wing party. . . . In Germany right now, my sculpture is being used by the neofascists to suppress art. In St. Louis, my piece was dismissed by the architect because it did not satisfy the needs of their urban design. In Washington, D.C. the work was defeated because it did not attend to the notion of elaborating on the democratic ideologies that this country thinks are necessary in terms of the decorative function of art. . . . I did not ‘serve the need of the country.’ They wanted me to put flag poles on top of pylons.” Richard Serra and Clara Weyergraf-Serra, Interviews, Etc., 1970–1980 (New York: The Hudson River Museum, 1980), 129–30. 22. Ibid., 171. 23. Sculpture is not quasi-architecture, or some kind of hybridity, transformed from architecture. The term quasi- is also a problematic one, which is related to the problem of the origin. In Plato’s theory, art is conceived as an imitation or mimesis of reality. In terms of the notion of quasi-, sculpture is misunderstood as a lower category under architecture and is originating from architecture. Sculpture and architecture are completely different realms. 24. Serra, Writings, Interviews, 163. 25. Wojciech Roszkowski, “The Origin of the Polish Crisis,” in Poland’s Transformation: A Work in Progress, ed. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, John Radzilowski and Dariusz Tolczyk (New Jersey: Transaction Publisher, 2006), 25. 26. Henry W. Morton and Robert C. Stuart, eds., The Contemporary Soviet City (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1984), 26–30. 27. John E. Jackson, Jacek Klich and Krystyna Poznańska, The Political Economy of Poland’s Transition: New Firms and Reform Governments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1. 28. Jasper Goldman, “Warsaw: Reconstruction as Propaganda,” in The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, ed. Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 148–51. 29. “Monika Sosnowska, 1:1,” e-flux, 13 May 2007, http://www.e-flux.com/ announcements/monika-sosnowska-11/.

Conclusion

Throughout the chapters of this book, I attempted to reconsider the most influential and dominant ideas in the perception of a sculptural practice since the 1960s: the place of a sculptural work in the phenomenological field and its place in the expanded field. Generally, this tradition is associated with an emphasis on the concept of the perception of the beholder, developed by Fried and Merleau-Ponty, and the binary opposition between not-landscape and not-architecture, provided by Krauss. However, none of these ideas focus on the political dimension of sculptural practice, which I consider a significant factor not only in the contemporary condition of sculptural production, but also in the relationship of a sculptural work with its environment, the space of everyday life or urban space. By looking at particular cases of urban transformation, I approach this political potentiality of the sculptural through two different yet inseparable modes of thinking. The one penetrates the space between things and ideas, opening up space to generate gaps, breaks and cracks. The other re-maps existing relations and systems, by distributing a new spatial logic and readdressing the reality of the space. This spatial logic creates a new space that exists in between established relations and orders. This logic of the sculptural, which is distinct from the traditional idea of sculpture, finds and recovers a neglected aspect, generating and passing through the space between a sculptural practice, an idea and urbanism, particularly exploring ways in which a sculptural work forms its relationship with its environment or urban space; urban space and an ordinary object attend to and affect the process of sculpturalization, and the political potentiality of a sculptural practice functions in the reproduction of existing relations, orders and systems. Influenced by some art theories and practices, the logic of the sculptural is particularly recognized through consideration of the meaning and function of an object and its production of territoriality. 167

168 Conclusion

The object’s territoriality can be produced and changed through the operation of the concept of politics, whereby the object discovers and develops its political potentiality, which not only constructs and sustains the physical and conceptual structure of a work of art in a particular manner, but also creates and distributes its own spatial law or logic in and through its occupied space. This spatial law is an important factor that not only determines a sculptural work’s relationship with its environment, but also allocates the object’s particular function in the regime of the sculptural. The motivation of exploring the logic of the sculptural in this book began with a traditional idea that a sculptural work is systemized and read according to the immersive experience of the spectator. This spatial systematization of space is identified with an environment, a situation that simply encompasses every genre of art and different ideas in a single unit. This idealistic perspective of the sculptural practice mostly involves situating a sculptural work in the field of phenomenology, providing an affirmative and even totalized relationship with its environment. In this respect, my aim in this book has been to develop not only the expanded concept of the object, but also the sculptural method of installation, which is opposed to a unitary system dominated by a single point of view of the perceiving subject. Rather, the sculptural explores and proposes a political potentiality of the object and its complex relationship with the environment, instead of identifying a sculptural practice simply with an environment or a space. In terms of the dialectics of the logic of the sculptural, art objects are understood as forming a political zone, constituted and operated by contradictory political powers, through which, on the one hand, a new order of inclusion and exclusion is produced and, on the other hand, the new order is distributed in relation to the system of the world. The political function of the object is essential in establishing and distributing the singularity of a work of art, because it is politics that allows an object to be systemized, operated and therefore active in the world. The function and role of the object in the regime of the sculptural that I have taken in approaching this research, therefore, is defined by its participation in the production of a particular form of territorialization, which relies on political commitments to ideas, methods and processes of governing a space. This recognition of the function of the object in the governance of space is related to the formation of a new geography of power relations through the reconfiguration of an existing space, according to the politics of equality. In this process, a sculptural work can be enabled to enter a given space and re-map existing systems and orders of the space. Equality can be understood as the enforcement of an artist’s sovereign freedom. Distribution is the act of expanding this sovereign force of the artist in engagement with the object’s environment. By considering this particular aspect, I emphasize

Conclusion

169

the role of the sculptural object in constructing and circulating a new mode of spatial continuity with the surrounding world. The object is spatial and political in itself, owing to its three-dimensionality. The object, therefore, acts as a political agent that can produce and operate a particular mode of installation; I distinguish this from the unitary and totalizing spatial system of traditional installation art of the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, installation as a main sculptural strategy not only causes the objects to become related in a particular way, but also invents a new mode of spatial systematization, by which an object can (de)territorialize a certain area of real space. Installation develops a logic of territory so that an existing space is transformed into another; discrete things and ideas can enter a certain relationship, constructing a type of territory or a form of the visible. The sculptural recognizes the political dimension of space, particularly in the contradictory relationship between a sculptural practice and urban space. Space is not conceived of as an empty and neutral container, in which theories and practices can emerge and be contextualized safely. Rather, it is a contested zone, in which different elements and powers conflict and create a new order and relation in the process of change. Difference is immanent in a space. Difference is functional as it makes instability coexist with stability; a dominant power interacts with a dominated power in a particular relationship. Difference is also revolutionary, in that it prevents a space from being controlled and occupied completely by a single, dominating power. The political dimension of space – which is a fundamental factor in the production of the sculptural – is, therefore, approached by two different yet inseparable ways of thinking. First, urban space is considered as an order, whereby a dominating power has a tendency to homogenize a space under its control or law. Lefebvre sees homogenization as an essential part of contemporary urban space, which is produced in and through the complex relationship between the logic of capitalism and the production of abstract space. In the realm of abstract space, capitalism has created spatial homogenization, hierarchization and social fragmentation, which can be understood as fundamental aspects of urban centralization. For example, the expansion and development of global capitalization has engendered homogeneities rather than heterogeneities or differences. In the case of Seoul urbanization, after the (re)development, the production of spatial order is particularly actualized through the process of spatial homogenization and standardization, filling the area with repetitions of similar types of high-rise building and apartment. Degenerated spaces keep disappearing, owing to changing aesthetic values and the functional role of economic efficiency in the logic of market competition. In contrast with this homogenization of urban space, the space is, at the same time, socially and politically separated, fragmented and hierarchized.

170 Conclusion

Second, in the process of globalization, constructed spatial hierarchies and differences tend to become suppressed by a particular flow and invasion of capital. The reproduction of the social relations of production in this suppressed space, however, necessarily provides and is, therefore, operated by two contradictory yet interactive tendencies of (spatial) movement; by constructive and destructive forces. In this respect, the ordering or hierarchy of urban space is temporary and unstable, because it has the potential to generate political zones; a deterritorializing force can be created and distributed to degenerate an old spatial system, while existing orders and relations are reproduced in the new logic of space for its survival. These particular aspects of the sculptural resonate with a contemporary tendency of the transformation of urban space, specifically, the dynamic relationship between the generation and degeneration of urban space in terms of the logic of capital. The importance of the relation of the sculptural to the urban or urbanism lies, therefore, not in its identification with either urban space or the sculptural, but in the fact that it penetrates the urban strata through and beyond existing limits and orders. The sculptural does not describe urban space or translate it into another language, for example, a sculptural language; rather, it focuses on discovering and developing gaps and cracks in real space or the established system of space, so as to transform vulnerable zones into main structural axes. From a political perspective, the transformation of power relations is achieved through these vulnerable zones of gaps and cracks; it is in this way that the power can easily be formed, circulated and redistributed in a new spatial system and principle. The neoliberal tendency of urban transformation also recognizes the political potentiality of this minor space but in a different way, in which the right and freedom of an individual can be recovered by having power within an institutional framework. Neoliberalism shifts the traditional role of the state, which is seen as a repressive ruling power, but does so by simplifying either the increase or reduction of power. Rather than acting through the binary opposition between the oppressive and the oppressed, neoliberalism has, since the 1990s, transformed the structure of power through a strengthening of the interrelationship between the state and local governments in the process of urban restructuring. This changed idea of the form of governance plays an important role in the shifting pattern of urbanization, and particularly its association with globalized economic circumstances. A centralized state power becomes globalized by distributing its power into local governments or authorities across the world and by transforming its role from that of controlling local powers to that of protecting them. However, in many cases, it intervenes to act repressively. Primarily, neoliberal urban development is based on a theory in which a right of decision-making is allocated to local authorities and private agents in order to (re)construct

Conclusion

171

the city; the structure of power relations is mainly controlled by the logic of market competition, the free market and free trade. The notion of freedom in neoliberalism, however, cannot be confused with the emancipation of individuals from the ingrained problem of political and social inequality, because it does not stand for protecting the minor power or what is called a vulnerable zone, but for creating a better spatial condition for producing and circulating capital. The vulnerable zone in the system of neoliberal urbanism is easily taken away or dispossessed by a dominant individual. As Harvey claims, the liberalist trend of urban privatization brings about political problems, particularly the contradiction between possessive individualism and the desire for a meaningful collective life; this accentuates social and economic inequality and therefore solidifies the powerful class of corporations and financiers by limiting a huge success for that class. My interest in urban space and urbanization is not that I want to reduce the meaning and function of a sculptural practice into a simple, unitary part of urban planning or the logic of capital. As the sculptural can exist, be expressive and operate only in the space of difference, this book discovers a potential and actual difference, for example, between the urbanism of urban planning and that of a sculptural practice; on the premise of their difference, a connection can be proposed. While urbanization led by architecture and urban planning tends to systemize, mobilize and hierarchize a space according to the logic of capital, geographical difference and inequality, a sculptural practice reproduces the space – which was once produced by urban planning – in its own paradigm. In other words, a sculptural practice no longer utilizes a space affirmatively, by referring to the existing system of orders and relations, but it actualizes its political potentiality through the method of re-mapping and equalizing a given space. Referring to the recent tendency of urban privatization, particularly in the case of the large-scale urban redevelopment in Seoul, led by a private development company, I focus on the difference of the sculptural use of urban space, in which a sculptural work constructs and enforces its new paradigm through the reconfiguration of power structures and relations in an existing space. A sculptural practice does not aim to be contextualized within an existing mapping system; rather, it invents a means of (re)mapping real spaces. The capability of the reproduction of the system of power relations is significant not only in determining the actualization of this sculptural method of mapping spaces – which is achieved through the function of the object and installation – but also in operating the logic of the sculptural. Through the contradictory relationship with the urban, the sculptural enables us to create and actualize a new mode of relation, whereby a sculptural work participates in the system of everyday life or the environment in a particular way; an urban space functions as an essential part in producing a

172 Conclusion

sculptural practice. The sculptural can make different things and ideas interdependent. Apart from enabling us to consider the problem of being a unitary body of urban space or a spaceless entity, the sculptural can help us to think of the expanded idea of a three-dimensional work of art, which functions as a critical factor in association with urban space, developing – or further constructing or destroying – a given space by distributing a sculptural mode of spatialization in the web of life. As opposed to the traditional idea that space does not make capitalism, although capitalism can produce and determine a space, the expanded concept of the sculptural illuminates the significance of the political dynamism of space, which not only potentially or actually assists in the process of production, for example, of relations, orders, things, ideas or the visible, but also functions as an engine that can construct a territory of the sculptural, crossing over existing intensities and limits of the built environment.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. For Marx. London: Verso. 2005. Andre, Carl. 5 × 20 Altstadt Rectangle, 1967. Accessed 9th April 2013. http://www. diaart.org/exhibitions/main/112. Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Culture Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Asher, Michael. Sculpture, 1977. Accessed 13th May 2013. http://www.lwl.org/ LWL/Kultur/skulptur-projekte/kuenstler/asher/?lang=en. Baudelaire, Charles. “Why Sculpture Is Boring.” Quoted in Potts, Alex. The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects, translated by James Benedict. London: Verso, 2005. Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, translated by F.L. Pogson. Montana: Kenssinger Publishing, 1996. Bianco, Jamie S. “Techno-Cinema: Image Matters in the Affective Unfolding of Analog Cinema and New Media.” In Clough, Patricia T., and Jean Halley, eds. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Bishop, Claire. Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate Publishing, 2005. Bois, Yve-Alain, and Rosalind Krauss. Formless: A User Guide, New York: Zone Books, 1997. Bui, Phong. “Sarah Sze with Phong Bui.” Brooklyn Rail. 6th October, 2010. Accessed 14th May 2013. http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/10/art/phong-buiwith-sarah-sze#. Cash, Stephanie. “The Importance of Things: Q+A with Sarah Sze.” Art in America, 2010. Accessed 12th May, 2013. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/ news-opinion/conversations/2012-10-12/sarah-sze-high-museum/. “Census of Population and Housing.” Kostat. Accessed 3rd June 2012. http://kostat. go.kr/portal/korea/kor_nw/2/1/index.board?bmode=read&aSeq=249070.

173

174 Bibliography

Chung, Jae-Yong, and Richard J.R. Kirkby. The Political Economy of Development and Environment in Korea. London: Routledge, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton. London: Continnum, 2004. ———. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Michael Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. ———. Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Hugh Tomlinson. London: The Athlone Press, 1983. ———. The Fold. London: Continuum, 2006. ———. “The Rise of the Social.” In a foreword of Donzelot, Jacques. The Policing of Family: Welfare versus the State, translated from the French by Robert Hurley. London: Hutchinson, 1980. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogue II, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Continuum, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated and foreword by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004. ———. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. London: Continuum, 2004. Deutsche, Rosalyn. Eviction: Art and Spatial Politics, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998. Duchamp, Marcel. “The Creative Act.” Art News 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957): 28–29. Elden, Stuart. Understanding of Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the possible. London: Continuum, 2004. Ellin, Nan. Postmodern Urbanism. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996. Feldman, Paula, Alistair Rider, and Karsten Schubert, eds. About Carl Andre: Critical Texts since 1965. London: Ridinghouse, 2006. Foster, Hal. The Art-Architecture Complex. London: Verso, 2011. ———. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996. Foster, Hal, and David Sylvester. Richard Serra: Sculpture 1985–1998. Los Angeles: Steidl, 2000. Foucault, Michel. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Vol. I, translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books, 1976. Geyer, H.S. ed. International Handbook of Urban Systems: Studies of Urbanization and Migration in Advanced and Developing Countries. Massachusetts: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2002. Goldman, Jasper. “Warsaw: Reconstruction as Propaganda.” In Vale, Lawrence J., and Thomas J. Campanella, eds. The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Greenberg, Clement. “Towards a Newer Laocoon.” In Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Groves, Richard, Alan Murie, and Christopher Watson, eds. Housing and the New Welfare State: Perspectives from East Asia and Europe. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007.

Bibliography

175

Ha, Michael. “Lee Says Protest Deaths Heartbreaking, Deplorable.” Korea Times. 21st January 2009. Accessed 2nd June 2012. http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/ news/include/print.asp?newsIdx=38284. Haber, John. “Beyond Infinity.” Haberarts. Accessed 18th May 2013. http://www. haberarts.com/sze.htm. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. The Limits to Capital. London: Verso, 2006. ———. Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. London: Verso, 2006. ———. The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism. London: Profilebooks, 2010. ———. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990. ———. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996. ———. The Urban Experience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971. “Homeless Population Rises Despite Gov’t Welfare Programs.” Yonhapnews. 25th September 2011. Accessed 8th June 2013. http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/nation al/2011/09/25/0302000000AEN20110925000800320.HTML. Jackson, John E., Jacek Klich, and Krystyna Poznańska. The Political Economy of Poland’s Transition: New Firms and Reform Governments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. New York: Cornell University Press, 1981. Jessop, Bob. The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999. Kaprow, Allan. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. ———. Yard, 1961. New York: Martha Jackson Gallery. Accessed 12th April 2013. http://disturbis.esteticauab.org/DisturbisII/Paulo.html. Kaye, Nick. Site-specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. London: Routledge, 2000. Klotz, Heinrich. The History of Postmodern Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Krauss, Rosalind E. Passages in Modern Sculpture. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1981. ———. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. London: MIT Press, 1986. ———. “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum.” October 54 (Autumn 1990): 3–17. Le Corbusier. Towards a New Architecture. California: BN Publishing, 2008.

176 Bibliography

Lee, Eunjoo. “Park Reels Back ‘New Towns’ in Major Way.” Korea Joongang Daily. 19th April 2012. Accessed 2nd June 2013. http://mengnews.joinsmsn.com/view. aspx?gCat=030&aId=2951759. Lefebvre, Henri. Dialectical Materialism, preface by Stefan Kipfer and translated by John Sturrock. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009. ———. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996. ———. Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes, September 1959–May 1961, translated by John Moore. London: Verso, 1995. ———. The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1991. ———. The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production, translated by Frank Bryant. London: Allison & Busby, 1976. ———. The Urban Revolution, foreword by Neil Smith, translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Lippard, Lucy. Six Years: Dematerialization of the Art Object. California: University of California Press, 2001. Martin, John R. Baroque. London: Harper & Row Publishers, 1997. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology: Part One. New York: International Publishers Co., 1970. Marx, Karl. Capital, edited by David MacLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: SAGE Publications, 2005. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. London: Duke University Press, 2002. Matta-Clark, Gordon. Office Baroque, 1977. Accessed 18th May 2013. http:// www.e-flux.com/announcements/le-corbusier-jean-genet-gordon-matta-clarkroberto-rossellini/. Mattick, Paul. Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics. London: Routledge, 2003. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Primacy of Perception. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964. ———. The Visible and the Invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1973. “Metropolitan Seoul.” Photograph. 2007. Designobserver.com. http://places. designobserver.com/feature/paju-book-city-south-korea/37611/. Accessed 12th May 2013. Meyer, James. “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity.” In Suderburg, Erika, ed. Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. “Monika Sosnowska, 1:1.” E-flux. 13th May 2007. Accessed 30th May 2012. http:// www.e-flux.com/announcements/monika-sosnowska-11/. Morris, Robert. Untitled (L-beams), 1965. Stainless steel in three parts, dimensions variable. Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. Accessed 1st March 2013. http://www. neiu.edu/~wbsieger/Art201/201SG/2Sg201/201Sg2-3.htm. ———. Portland Mirrors, 1977 and Installation, 1964. Accessed 9th April 2013. http://www.dobbra.com/terreno.baldio/poeticcluster/mestrado/defesa/morris.htm.

Bibliography

177

Morton, Henry W., and Robert C. Stuart, eds. The Contemporary Soviet City. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1984. Newman, Michael, and Jon Bird, eds. Rewriting Conceptual Art. London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 1999. Newsome, W. Brian. French Urban Planning 1940–1968: The Construction and Deconstruction of an Authoritarian System. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. Orozco, Gabriel. Yielding Stone, 1992. Plasticine, 141516 inches. Accessed 12th May 2013. http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/gabriel-orozco-tatemodern-curators-blog. Panerai, Phillippe, Jean Castex, and Jean-Charles Depaule. Urban Forms: The Death and Life of the Urban Block. Oxford: Architectural Press, 2004. Pascher, Stephan. “Phantom Limb: Michael Asher’s Sculpture Project.” Afterall 17, Spring, 2008. Accessed 10th May 2013. http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.17/ phantom.limb.michael.ashers.sculpture.project. Potts, Alex. The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Price, Roger. The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Ran, Faye. A History of Installation Art and the Development of New Art Form: Technology and the Hermeneutics of Time and Space in Modern and Postmodern Art from Cubism to Installation. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2009. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics, translated with an introduction by Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum, 2004. ———. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, edited and translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2010. ———. Aesthetics and Its Discontents, translated by Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Reiss, Julie H. From Margin to Center: The Space of Installation Art. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001. “Removal Area in Seoul.” Photograph. 2013. Udp.or.kr. http://www.udp.or.kr/v2.0/ bbs/board.php?bo_table=article01&wr_id=3344. Accessed 15th May 2013. Roszkowski, Wojciech. “The Origin of the Polish Crisis.” In Chodakiewicz, Marek Jan, John Radzilowski, and Dariusz Tolczyk, eds. Poland’s Transformation: A Work in Progress. New Jersey: Transaction Publisher, 2006. Sabel, Charles, and Jonathan Zeitlin. “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production.” In O’Brien, Patrick, ed. Industrialization: Critical Perspectives on the World Economy, Volume 1. London: Routledge, 1998. Sack, Robert D. Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Serra, Richard. Writings, Interviews. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. ———. Terminal, 1977. Four corten steel plates, each: 41 × 12 × 3½ inches. Bochum. Accessed 31st May 2012. http://klaus-praekelt.de/2011/03/19/ skulptur-terminal-von-richard-serra-am-hbf-bochum/.

178 Bibliography

Serra, Richard, and Clara Weyergraf-Serra. Interviews, Etc., 1970–1980. New York: The Hudson River Museum, 1980. Shapiro, Ann-Louise. Housing the Poor of Paris 1850–1902. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin, 1985. Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Sosnowska, Monika. “1:1.” Photograph. 2007. Nytimes.com. http://www.nytimes. com/2007/06/15/arts/design/15veni.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&adxnnl= 1&adxnnlx=1338552327-QpSICGUfEDeLCW6pdbvww. Assessed 31st May 2012. Stanek, Lukasz. “Space as Concrete Abstraction.” In Goonewardena, Kanishka, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid, eds. Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre. New York: Routledge, 2008. Suderburg, Erika, ed. Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Sze, Sarah. The Uncountables (Encyclopedia), 2010. Mixed media, metal shelves, wooden shelves, lights, plastic bottles, milk cartons, 454.7 × 1389.4 × 1242.1 cm. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Accessed 12th May 2013. http://www.sarahsze.com/projects/Bonakdar_2010/Bonakdar_03.html. ———. 360 (Portable Planetarium), 2010. Mixed media, wood, paper, string, jeans, rocks, 411.5 × 345.4 × 469.9 cm. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Accessed 12th May 2013. http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/exhibit. php?exhibit_id=245. ———. Imposters, Fillers and Editors (Liquid to Solid), 2010. Plaster in 309 pieces on bookcase, 208.3 × 482.6 × 449.6 cm. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Accessed 13th May 2013. http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/exhibit. php?exhibit_id=245. ———. Landscape for the Urban Dweller (Horizon Line), 2010. Mixed media, wood, Giclée prints, paper, string, dirt, 518.2 × 1244.6 × 711.2 cm. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Accessed 18th May 2013. http://www.art21.org/images/ sarah-sze/landscape-for-the-urban-dweller-horizon-line-2010. “The Grand Ensemble, Sarcelles.” Photograph. 1954. Leparisien.fr. http://www. leparisien.fr/espace-premium/val-d-oise-95/l-architecte-du-grand-ensemble-aurasa-rue-18-12-2012-2416311.php. Accessed 24th February 2013. “The Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw, Poland.” Photograph. Wikipedia.org. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Culture_and_Science,_Warsaw. Accessed 5th June 2012. Trotsky, Leon. The Third International After Lenin, New York: Pathfinder, 1970. Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. London: The Architectural Press, 1977. “Wave Houses, Gdansk, Poland.” Photograph. Spiegel.de. http://www.spiegel.de/ fotostrecke/photo-gallery-glories-of-socialist-architecture-fotostrecke-70849-15. html. Accessed 5th June 2012. Wodiczko, Krzysztof. Homeless Vehicle, 1999. Aluminum, plywood, plastic, fabric, steel, rubber, 72 × 92 × 40 inches. Accessed 7th June 2013. http://www.

Bibliography

179

canberra.edu.au/schools/design/sites/cid2006/wealth/WPSpread3.html, and http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Homeless_Vehicle_New_York_2_SMALL.JPG. Yoon, Changwon. “LH’s Urban Development Project.” Every News. 21st September 2012. Accessed 10th May 2013. http://www.everynews.co.kr/news/articleView. html?idxno=917. Young, Julian. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Index

Page locators followed by ‘f’, ‘n’ and ‘t’ indicate figures, notes and tables respectively. abstract space, 90, 122 active forces, 35 Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Ranciere), 62 Afonso, Nadir, 118 Ahn, Kyuchul, 146–48, 151 Althusser, Louis, 96 Andre, Carl, 29–30 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 77, 79 Appadurai, Arjun, 116 “Art and Objecthood,” 31 Artforum, 31, 48 Asher, Michael, 86, 122, 142, 158 Bergson, Henri, 28–29 Beuys, Joseph, 71n88 body, and space, 49–51 Boileau, Roger, 99 bourgeoisie, 47, 63, 81, 83n33, 97, 100, 101 A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Harvey), 104 Brooklyn Anti-gentrification Network, 132 Brooklyn Real Estate Summit, 131 Building, Dwelling, Thinking (Heidegger), 74

Calder, Alexander, 157 capital accumulation, 12, 16, 91–93, 108–10, 119–20, 122, 154–55 capitalism/capitalist space, 35–37; destructive form of, 33–34, 36, 43, 55, 74, 76, 79, 92–93, 100, 108, 119–22, 143, 170; Marx’s theory of, 12–14, 16, 20, 81, 83–84n34, 86–87, 96, 114–15, 119, 133n3, 155; and urban space production, 85–94, 115. See also urbanism/urbanization Caro, Anthony, 157 CDU. See Christian Democratic Union (CDU) centrality/centralization, 15 “centres restructuratuers” (suburban growth poles), 106 Christian Democratic Union (CDU), 166n21 Cichocki, Sebastian, 159 circulation, sculptural, 115–16 C–M–C circulation, 115 collective monumental housing, 102 commodities, and sculptural work, 114–16 181

182 Index

The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 83n33 concentration and dispersal, 120–21, 154 condensed space, 23n9, 43 Conseil d’Etat and Cour des Comptes, 98 contradiction: logic of, 119, 121, 157; politics of, 16–17 contrived installation, 56 “The Creative Act,” 46 creative movement, 78 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 67n2, 136n74 cultural displacement, 130 “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum” (Krauss), 118 cultural revolution, 118, 123, 137n77, 142 Das Kapital (Marx), 13, 119 Day’s End (1975), 22 de-architecturalization, 36–37 de Blasio, Bill, 128–30 degenerate spaces, 108 deindustrialization, 22, 106 Deleuze, Gilles, 34–36, 43, 68nn19–20, 76–81, 100, 120, 144 Delouvrier, Paul, 106 de-Stalinization, 159 destructive method, of construction, 76 deterritorialization, 43–44, 60, 78–79, 169 Dewey, John, 41 differential space, 24n17, 90 differentiation. See spatial differentiation dispersal and concentration, 120–21 displaced space, 23n9, 43, 128, 130 Documenta VI exhibition, 157 Duchamp, Marcel, 45–48, 50, 57, 70n77, 124 dwelling space, 74–76, 88, 111–12, 151 Eisenman, Peter, 152 Elden, Stuart, 107

Eliasson, Olafur, 53, 71n88 Ellin, Nan, 102, 105 The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Harvey), 90 enormous (spatial) object, 54 environment/environmental installation, 38–42, 68–69n29, 158 Environments, Situations, Spaces (exhibition), 41 Environments (Kaprow), 40 equality and distribution, 62–63, 67 equalization, 8, 93–94, 100, 103, 121, 130, 134n22, 144 5 × 20 Altstadt Rectangle (1967), 29–30 fixed capital, 108–9 flexible accumulation, 108–9 flexible mode of production, 107 Fordism, 99, 107, 109, 124 For Marx (Althusser), 96 Forty-Nine Rooms (exhibition), 146 Foster, Hal, 73, 116–17 Foucault, Michel, 12, 24n15, 24n28 Fountain, 45–47 fragility, logic of, 55–57, 59 Fragmented Space (2010), xii Fried, Michael, 27, 31, 42, 55, 68n11, 116–17, 167 Friedman, Tom, 54 functional site, 38 Gaulle, Charles de, 106 gentrification, 102, 106, 108, 125–33 Genzken, Isa, 53 gestalt, 52–53 Glass, Ruth, 125–26 globalization, 14, 89, 93, 103–4, 107, 170 Goldsworthy, Andy, 39 goshiwon, 151 Grand Ensemble, 99 Greenberg, Clement, 8, 24n12, 31, 41, 49, 116

Index

Green River (1998–2001), 71n88 Guattari, Felix, 35–36, 43, 68nn19–20, 76–81, 83n20 harmonized space, 38 Harvey, David, 86–87, 90–91, 93–94, 98, 104, 109, 115, 119–20, 133n5, 134n22, 135n58, 155, 171 Haussmann, Georges-Eugene, 97–98, 100, 106 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 74–76, 79, 122 Heizer, Michael, 39 heterogeneities, 34, 119 Hidalgo, Anne, 106 The History of Postmodern Architecture (Klotz), 103 Homeless Vehicle, 139–45, 140f homogeneous time, 29 House of Cards (1969), 124 A House of 2.6 Square Meters (Ahn), 151 Hudson piers, 22 Human Territoriality (Sack), 154 idealist rationalism, 117 imaginary space, 118 Imposters, Fillers and Editors (Liquid to Solid) (2010), 55, 58 industrialization, 95, 97–99, 102, 106, 159 inner-city gentrification, 106 Installation (1964), 29 installation art, 27–42; and space politics, 42–67 internal contradiction, 119, 122 intimate mode, of sculpture, 49 intimate (non-spatial) object, 54 Introduction to Modernity (Lefebvre), 17 Istanbul Biennial, 39 Jakobson, Roman, 23n9 Jameson, Fredric, 118, 137n77 Jessop, Bob, 36 jjock-bang, 151 Judd, Donald, 29, 31, 53, 70n73, 117

183

Kant, Immanuel, 41, 47, 67n2, 117, 136n74 Kapoor, Anish, 53 Kaprow, Allan, 39–41 Klein group, 2 Klotz, Heinrich, 103 Krauss, Rosalind, 1–5, 7, 27, 33, 44–45, 118, 158, 167 Labourdette, Jacque-Henri, 99 Lacan, Jacque, 23n9 Landscape for the Urban Dweller (Horizon Line) (2010), 55, 58–59 “La Ville Contemporaine (Contemporary City),” 99 layering method, 164 L-beams (1965), 50 Le Corbusier, 99, 102–3, 118, 134–35n31 Lefebvre, Henri, 12–21, 24n17, 89–90, 99–100, 102, 107, 110–11, 125, 134n18, 169 The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (Kaprow), 40 The Limits to Capital (Harvey), 119 Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Zukin), 130 logic of capital. See capitalism/capitalist space London: Aspects of Change (Glass), 125 Long, Richard, 39 malleability, 7, 24n11 mandatory inclusionary housing, 129 Marcuse, Peter, 127 Martha Jackson Gallery, 41 Marx, Karl, 12–14, 16, 20, 81, 83–84n34, 86–87, 96, 114–15, 119, 133n3, 155 mass production/housing, 99, 122–25, 137n92 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 22, 36–38, 60 Mattick, Paul, 134n31 M–C–M circulation, 136n64 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 50–52, 167

184 Index

Meyer, James, 38 minimalist sculptures, 30–31, 49–50, 57, 116–19 Mirror Displacement (1969), 124 modernism, 33, 98, 102–3 Molotch, Harvey, 131 mono-functional zoning, 102 monumental mode, of sculpture, 49, 73, 82n4, 103, 105, 132 Morris, Robert, 29–30, 39, 44–45, 48–50, 52–54, 70n56, 116 movement theory, 29 multipart form, of sculpture, 53 Munster sculpture project (2007), 53 Napoléon, Louis III, 97 negative space, 50 neoliberalism, 104, 170–71 Newsome, Brian, 99 New Towns Act 1946, 106 New York City gentrification, 125–33 non-capitalist space, 35 non-environmentalization, 41–42, 44–45, 156, 158–59 Non-Object (2010), 53 “Notes on Sculpture, 1–3,” 48 “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art,” 39 “Notes on the New Town,” 17–18 objects, passim; enormous/spatial, 54; intimate/non-spatial, 54; Kantian approach to, 47–48; of labour, 105; minimalist, 30–31, 49–50; and space, 31–32; transformation of, 46–48 October (journal), 2 Office Baroque (Matta-Clark), 36–38 Oldenburg, Claes, 39 1:1 (2007), 159, 160f–161f ontological security, 74, 76 Orozco, Gabriel, 5–7, 86 overcoding, of space, 77–78

Palace of Culture and Science, 162f Paris, urban planning in, 95–111 Passages in Modern Sculpture (Krauss), 45 Pier In/Out (1973), 22 planned urbanism, 95–111 Poland, urbanization in, 159, 162–64 The Political Unconscious (Jameson), 137n77 The Politics of Aesthetics (Ranciere), 62 politics of space, 42–67, passim polycentralization, 106 Portland Mirrors (1977), 29 Price, Roger, 98 production modes, of space, 152–65 The Production of Space (Lefebvre), 14, 89 public mode, of sculpture, 49, 132 Ranciere, Jacques, 62–63, 65–66 reactive forces, 35, 100 “Reinventing Paris” project, 106 Re-moved (2010–2011), xii The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Foster), 116 Richard Serra: Sculpture, 1985–1998, 73 Right to the City, 89 Roszkowski, Wojciech, 159 Sabel, Charles, 124, 137n92 Sack, Robert, 154–55 Salcedo, Doris, 39 Schneckenburger, Manfred, 157 sculptural territorialization, 155 Sculpture (1977, 1987, 1997 and 2007), 86, 122, 158 “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” 2 Sculpture in the Expanded Field (Krauss), 33 sculpture/sculptural work, passim; and commodities, 114–16; concept of, 1–11; exclusive mode of, 7–10;

Index

expanded concept of, 1–2, 7, 19, 27, 32, 36–37, 42, 54, 60–61, 64, 74, 76, 80, 85, 87–88, 121, 153, 157, 168, 172; inclusive mode of, 5–7; intimate mode of, 49; mathematical model of, 2–3; minimalist, 30–31, 49–50, 57, 116–19; monumental mode of, 49, 73, 82n4, 103, 105, 132; multipart form of, 53; vs. ordinary object, 4t; and production of urban space, 85–94; public mode of, 49, 132; situating, 110f; unitary system of, 52–53; and urbanism, 11–23 Serra, Richard, 5, 39, 124, 152–53, 157–59, 163, 166nn20–21 7, 000 Oaks (1982), 71n88 Smith, David, 157 Smith, Neil, 134n22 Smithson, Robert, 4–5, 10, 32, 39, 124 socialist realism, 159 The Social Life of Things (Appadurai), 116 society, and space, 145–52 Society of Independent Artists, 45 socio-economic context, and capitalism, 90–91, 110, 113, 156 Sosnowska, Monika, 159, 162–64 South Korean urbanization, 111–25, 145–52 space, sculptural, passim; abstract, 90, 122; and body, 49–51; capitalist, 35–37; condensed, 23n9, 43; degenerate, 108; destructive form of, 33–34, 36, 43, 55, 74, 76, 79, 92–93, 100, 108, 119–22, 143, 170;

185

differential, 24n17, 90; displacement of, 23n9, 43, 128, 130; dwelling, 74–76, 88, 111–12; and environment, 38–42, 158; and functional site, 38; harmonized, 38; imaginary, 118; and installation methods, 27–42; negative, 50; object and, 31–32; overcoding of, 77–78; politics of, 42–67, passim; production modes of, 152–65; reconfiguration of, 43; society and, 145–52; and spatial concept, 33, 50; and spatialization stages, 40; and spectator, 31–32, 61; symmetrical system of, 30; time and, 28–29, 47; transit, 75–76; urban production of (See urbanism/urbanization); visibility and invisibility system, 51–52 spatial differentiation, 8, 15, 34, 45, 91–95, 107, 111, 119–20, 134n22 spatial dynamism, 62, 74 spatiality, 10, 47, 50, 76, 157 spatial systemization, 23n10, 29, 50, 52, 61, 76, 104, 142, 169 “Specific Objects,” 70n73 spectator, passim; movement, 28; and sculptural object, 60–61, 63; and space, 31–32, 61; and transformation of object, 46–48; unitary system, 52–53 state: mode of production, 107; and planned urbanization, 95–111; and war machine, 76–82 Statistics Korea, 145 Suderburg, Erika, 43 supermarket trolley, 141–42

186 Index

surface incident, 49 The Survival of Capitalism (Lefebvre), 12 Svayambh (2007), 53 Sze, Sarah, 53–60 Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 54–55 tenants, and urbanism, 113 Terminal (1977), 157, 166n21 territoriality/territorialization, 35, 37, 43–44, 58, 60, 64, 68n20, 77, 79, 82n5, 87–88, 92, 94, 100, 109, 153–56, 158–59, 164, 167–69 Teschke, Benno, 24n29 theatricality, 31–32 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari), 35, 43, 68n20, 83n20 360 (Portable Planetarium), 55–56 time, and space, 28–29, 47 Time and Free Will (Bergson), 28 totality/totalization, 28, 30–32, 42 Tour Areva, 106 Tour First, 106 Tour Maine-Montparnasse, 106 Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier), 102 transconsistency, 81 trans-environmental mode, 156, 159, 164 transit space, 75–76, 80 Treskon, Mark, 131 Trotsky, Leon, 24–25n29 two-dimensional work, 28, 142 The Uncountables (Encyclopedia) (2010), 53, 55 uneven and combined development, 24–25n29, 134n19 unitary system, of sculpture, 52–53 Unité d’Habitation (1952), 118 “The Un/making of Sculpture,” 73 Untitled (Bubblegum) (1990), 54

Untitled (Fly) (1995), 54 Untitled Performance (1971), 22 Untitled (Self-Portrait) (1994), 54 urban development. See urbanism/urbanization urbanism/urbanization/urban transformation: destructive form of, 33–34, 36, 43, 55, 74, 76, 79, 92–93, 99–100, 108, 119–22, 143, 170; Homeless Vehicle, 139–45, 140f; and logic of capital, 85–94, 115; Marx’s theory of, 12–14, 16, 20, 81, 83–84n34, 86–87, 96, 114–15, 119, 133n3, 155; and planning in Paris, 95–111; in Poland, 159; and sculptural space, 11–23; in South Korea, 111–25, 145–52. See also capitalism/capitalist space urban power, 80–81 The Urban Revolution (Lefebvre), 20 Venice Biennale, 159 Venturi, Robert, 103 The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty), 51 war machine, and state, 76–82 Wave Houses, 163f The Weather Project (2003–2004), 53 Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 139–42 world-wide capitalist machine, 79 Writings on Cities (Lefebvre), 99 Yard (installation work), 41 Yielding Stone, 5–7, 6f, 86 Yongsan incident, 136n59, xiii Young, Julian, 74–75, 82n9 Zeitlin, Jonathan, 124, 137n92 Zukin, Sharon, 130

About the Author

Euyoung Hong, PhD, is an artist and a researcher. Hong graduated in sculpture from Ewha Womans University, Seoul in 1998, and was awarded an MA and MFA in sculpture by the University of Iowa, Iowa, in 2002. She completed her PhD without any amendment at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2013. She received many prestigious grants and prizes, provided by Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, Gyeonggi, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, Second Prize, Premio Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milano and Paradise Culture Foundation, Seoul. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with Saatchi Gallery, London, Metropolitan Arts Centre (MAC), Belfast, Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art, Gyeonggi, Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, CICA Museum, Gyeonggi, International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York and many others. She is currently teaching at Ewha Womans University, Seoul.

187